Ouvrir la Science - Transformative agreements: what effects on the economics of academic publishing?

The study Contracting in the Age of Open Access Publications. A systematic analysis of Transformative Agreements focuses on a contemporary innovation related to the economics of academic publication: the so-called transformative agreements, which emerge in 2010 and grow rapidly from 2015 onwards. These agreements explicitly seek to organize the transition from the journal subscription model to that of open access, by reallocating library budgets. How do they fit into the current division between major scientific publishers who own or distribute journals on the one hand, and university libraries, often gathered in national consortia, who pay subscriptions to access journal content on the other? What financial transformations do they intend to bring about in the relationship between publishers and consortia? Funded by the Committee for Open Science, this sociological analysis is the first systematic study of transformative agreements. It was conducted by researchers from the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CNRS/Mines Paristech) between February and December 2020, as part of a larger project which analyzes the changing economy of academic publication in the open access age.