Transformation or consolidation - Evaluating transformative agreements at Uppsala University with an eye to the future | Zenodo

In the last few years, we have seen how publishing agreements have become increasingly common across Europe. At Uppsala University, the traditional subscription agreements now represent a minority of our agreements with the publishers and we suspect they will be phased out. Currently, our most common type of publishing agreements are the transformative agreements negotiated on the national level by the Bibsam consortia and offered to all Swedish higher education institutions. These transformative agreements currently cover most major international publishers and could be considered the new normal. Uppsala University is one of the largest and oldest universities in northern Europe. We are a truly multidisciplinary university, covering the humanities, social sciences, medicine, science and technology. This means that the university library should ideally be able to provide the same level of publishing support for theologists as well as geologists. With that in mind, the library was tasked to evaluate our portfolio of publishing agreements, with a special focus on the impact of the transformative ones. We wanted specifically to look at these new agreements in regards to 1) the impact for the individual researchers 2) economic aspects on various levels, and 3) the paradigm shift towards open science that is taking place in scholarly communication.