Do Transformative Agreements Violate Procurement Requirements? - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Universities must abide by procurement policies, including for their library license agreements with scholarly publishers. Because each publisher’s content is exclusive to it, subscription license agreements typically fall under a sole source procurement model, and therefore are exempt from any kind of competitive bidding process. But open access publishing services are different — enabling a scholar to publish is not nearly as exclusively provided as a subscription. As a result, it may be desirable for universities to procure open access publishing services through a bidding process, and in some cases it might be mandatory to do so. How do the procurement implications for open access publishing services affect the transformative agreements that are all the rage today? 

Today’s piece has its origin in our debate about the implications of a rant by Gunther Eysenbach, an open access publisher, admonishing libraries to — among other things — employ “proper procurement/bidding processes.” Our piece today is the result of our struggle to understand if this aspect of his argument has any validity, focusing on individual universities but also recognizing that some consortia may face similar dynamics...."