An OASPA conference sponsor post: Top 5 Resources on Transformative Agreements

This guest post is one of a series from sponsors of the OASPA Conference in 2019. Please note that the views in this post do not represent an official view or statement from OASPA. This post is by Chuck Hemenway of Copyright Clearance Center. 

Transformative Agreements are a popular topic of conversation these days – but do you ever feel like you need a quick refresher course on the topic? Read, watch, or listen to the items below for a deeper practical understanding of Transformative Agreements, fast. 

1. “TRANSFORMATIVE AGREEMENTS: What are transformative agreements?” from ESAC Initiative 

Transformative Agreements are those contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services.
Bonus: Browse ESAC’s Agreement Registry for summaries of dozens of recent Transformative Agreements. 

2: “Plan S Revisions Made Simple” from Copyright Clearance Center

With insights from Rob Johnson of Research Consulting, we cover all things Plan S: what has changed, what has stayed the same, and what might happen next.

3: “Transformative Agreements: A Primer” from The Scholarly Kitchen

Is it every day or just every week that we see an announcement of a new ’Transformative Agreement‘ between a publisher and a library or library consortium? Or, if not a press release announcing such an agreement, a statement that such is the goal of a newly opened — or perhaps faltering — set of negotiations? Almost as quickly, the questions start. What’s read-and-publish? Is this contract Plan S compliant? What makes an agreement transformative anyway?

4: “The First Read and Publish Deal with California: An Interview with Cambridge University Press” from The Scholarly Kitchen

Cambridge University Press and the University of California have just agreed to a transformational ‘Read and Publish’ deal in principle. Under its terms, 60% of California’s overall spend on Cambridge journals will be used to support unlimited open access (OA) publishing; the remainder, assigned to accessing content that is not OA.

5: “UC launches toolkit for negotiating transformative agreements with scholarly publishers” from University of California Office of Scholarly Communication

Following the 2018 release of the provostial Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee’s Call to Action, the University of California (UC) Academic Senate and Libraries partnered to utilize publisher negotiations to address the issues of journal subscription affordability and open access (OA) transformation.