The datafication in transformative agreements for open access publishing | Samuel Moore

Transformative agreements are an increasingly common way for universities and consortia to shift publisher business models towards open access. They do this through a prearranged payment that allows institutions to access subscription content while allowing future research to published in an openly accessible form. These deals are a way for publishers to continue to receive subscription income and boast about their open access content, while universities value them as a cost-neutral strategy for transitioning away from subscriptions towards open access (read Lisa Hinchliffe’s primer for an excellent summary of transformative agreements).

Such agreements are being announced by universities and national negotiating bodies on a weekly basis. This week Elsevier announced a pilot agreement with the University of Florida, while Taylor & Francis promoted its new deal with a Finnish library consortium. In recent weeks we’ve also seen deals announced between Springer-Nature and the University of California, and Elsevier and a consortium of Dutch universities. It has been pretty clear for some time that transformative agreements are going to be a dominant model for the transition to open access, particularly for the larger commercial publishers who are quickly learning how to work these deals to their advantage.

There are a number of critics of transformative agreements. Many commentators argue that these deals have a tendency to benefit the publisher rather than the university, as Sicco de Knecht argues with respect to the Elsevier-Netherlands deal. Similarly, Dave Ghamandi describes these deals as a ‘con’ that does nothing to shift power away from the ‘monopolists’. I’m embedding Dave’s Twitter thread below because it is an excellent and impassioned argument about commercial ownership of scholarly communication and the way that transformative agreements merely reinforce rather than counter this problem.