Ten years of Transformative Agreements | Research Information

"When we look at our figures, we see that globally the number of articles published under a TA in 2023 grew much faster compared to articles published OA outside of our TAs. This demonstrates the effectiveness of these agreements to encourage greater uptake of OA publishing. At the end of 2023, 31% of our total OA journal output was published under such an agreement and we see this growing uptake of TAs across the industry.

On a country level, we see that countries where we have a TA with a national consortium have much higher levels of OA output compared to countries where we either don't have TAs, or our TA coverage is limited to individual institutions. In the graph below you see that the UK, Sweden, Ireland and Canada are able to publish between 83% and 97% of their articles OA under one of our TAs. Whereas Spain, Japan, France and India, where we only have TAs with individual institutions, the output of open research articles is significantly lower.  

However, when we look at the effectiveness of TAs at individual institutions, we see some impressive results. For instance, before the Canadian Research Consortium (CRKN) secured their TA with us, only 28% of their research was published OA. That percentage increased to 87% in the first year of the agreement, reaching 96% in its second year....

Of course, there is still a lot more work to be done. As the OA publishing model typically shifts the cost from readers to authors or their institutions through article publication charges (APCs), there is a growing need to support those with limited access to funding.

The disparities in accessible and available funding are a cause for serious concern if we are to create an equitable OA landscape. Funding inequalities are particularly pronounced when comparing institutions in lower-middle income countries to regions with high levels of research funding such as Europe, the United States and China. This imbalance in funding poses a significant hurdle for researchers at institutions from less economically developed regions, limiting their capacity to publish their work openly. Addressing these disparities is crucial if we are to create an equitable open access publishing landscape....

Even though there are more and better open-access journals now, most research still gets published in hybrid journals. For example, in physics, only about one-third of articles are published in fully open-access journals each year...."