Transformative agreements are not the key to open access | Times Higher Education (THE)

"For years, there has been a debate about the most effective strategy to achieve universal open access to scholarly publications. This has unnecessarily pitted two approaches against each other: the “gold” approach, based on open-access journals, and the “green” approach, based on open-access repositories. While there are strengths and drawbacks to each, both are critical – for the moment, at least....

The Plan S requirement for immediate open access has further fuelled the debate. In a recent article published in Times Higher Education, Springer Nature's chief publishing officer, Stephen Inchcoombe, argues that transformative agreements (TAs) are the fastest route towards full open access. Yet these agreements – which allow researchers to both access journals’ subscription content and to publish in them open access – are only available to institutions or countries with the substantial funds required to pay for them. In addition, they sometimes take years to negotiate and, because most institutions will not be able to afford TAs with all publishers, they lock researchers into publishing in specific venues.

Moreover, TAs do not transform journals to open access, but make individual articles available for a fee. While such “transformative journals” are supposedly on a path to becoming fully open access, the real direction of travel is questionable. As such, transformative agreements alone will only result in a slow and partial transition to open access, with content remaining siloed in various publisher platforms.

That underlines the case for a parallel green route. Inchcoombe claims that repository content is of lower quality and has less visibility than the publishers’ version. But the accepted manuscript (the most common version found in repositories) contains the same content as the published version. In addition, articles in repositories such as arXiv, Pubmed Central and Zenodo, as well as many institutional repositories, are both highly used and highly cited. ..."