Guidelines for Evaluating Transformative Open Access Agreements | Office of Scholarly Communication

In this document we set forth guidelines that the University of California (UC) applies when evaluating systemwide transformative agreements with publishers. Transformative agreements are those that substantially shift payments for subscriptions (reading) into payments for open access (publishing). By intention and design, most such agreements are transitional and thus these guidelines are intended to be used during the years of transition to full open access.  

Transformative agreements — and behavior by publishing partners — should exhibit these characteristics for an agreement to be recommended for adoption at UC.  

UC’s goal of overall expenditure reduction for its journals portfolio provides important context for these guidelines. Within that overall goal, our assessment of publication value along with the degree of conformity to the guidelines in this document may warrant some variation in the level of expenditure UC is willing to make for any particular agreement. Given the goal of overall expenditure reduction, total expenditure in a given agreement will be a more important consideration for larger (more expensive) deals.

These guidelines are derived from the principles set forth by key UC stakeholder groups engaged in shaping our open access efforts. Many of those principles were presented in documents listed in Sources, below.