What Gets Missed in the Discourse on Transformative Agreements | Katina Magazine

"Over the past several years, transformative agreements (TAs) have come to represent both a promising mechanism for challenging the entrenched financial streams of subscription paywalls and a lightning rod for criticism for just about everything that is considered wrong with scholarly communications.

Critics raise concerns that TAs disproportionately benefit the largest commercial publishers, consolidating their market dominance. Other see TAs as reinforcing the pay-to-publish model, voicing the critique that article processing charge- (APC-) based open access publishing simply trades one barrier for another and that publication-based pricing models create incentives for publishers to decrease quality measures in order to increase article volume and maximize profits. In addition, some see TAs as a continuation of “big deals” that tie up increasing portions of library budgets and limit flexibility to support other, emerging open access (OA) business models.

Yet the data show that TAs are a net improvement on the previous state of affairs. Institutions and research communities negotiating TAs are making unprecedented levels of new research publicly available, eliminating author-facing APCs and generating substantial savings (Brayman et al., 2024), curtailing the potential of commercial publishers to monetize the works of authors, increasing transparency around the financial streams of scholarly publishing, and optimizing OA publishing workflows with community-driven standards...."