The Transformative Agreements that are not so transformative

The Transformative Agreements That are Not So Transformative

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Table of Contents

Introduction

In the world of academic publishing, few topics spark as much intense debate and hope, sometimes misplaced, as the concept of Transformative Agreements. These agreements, often negotiated between library consortia or individual institutions and major publishers, aim to shift the financial burden and model of scholarly communication from paying for journal subscriptions (the classic “read” model) to paying for authors to publish their articles open access. 

The most common iteration is the “Publish and Read” (P&R) agreement, where an institution pays a single fee that covers both the cost of subscribing to a publisher’s entire journal portfolio. It also covers the Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its affiliated authors to publish in the same journals. The lofty goal? To accelerate the transition to a fully open access environment globally, ensuring that publicly funded research is immediately and freely accessible to all.

This concept sounds utopian, a perfect bridge from the antiquated subscription model to a truly open future. Yet, a closer inspection reveals a more complex, and frankly, often disappointing reality. The “transformative” nature of these agreements is frequently questioned by librarians, researchers, and open-access advocates alike. Are they truly moving the needle towards equitable, sustainable, and universal open access, or are they merely serving as an expensive, temporary Band-Aid, cleverly disguising the persistent power dynamics and high costs that plague the academic publishing landscape? 

The journey from a subscription-based model to open access was never going to be simple. The path paved by many Transformative Agreements appears more like a toll road with perpetually rising fees, heavily favoring the publishers who currently dominate the market.

The Promise of Transformation

The initial, genuine motivation behind the Transformative Agreements was to solve a genuine problem: the double-dipping phenomenon. Under the hybrid open access model, institutions paid a subscription fee to read the content, and they also paid an APC for their authors to make specific articles open access. This meant the publisher was getting paid twice for the same content. 

Transformative Agreements were designed to resolve this by bundling the fees. The institution pays a set fee that is supposed to be “cost-neutral” in the initial years, reflecting what it previously spent on subscriptions, plus an allowance for publishing. In theory, as more articles transition to open access, the subscription component of the cost should decrease, and the publishing component should increase, eventually leading to a model in which the entire payment is for publishing services and all content is open access.

The success of Project DEAL in Germany or the agreements struck by the University of California (UC) system with major entities like Elsevier and Springer Nature are often cited as prime examples of this model in action. These high-profile deals demonstrate the sheer volume of articles that can be transitioned to immediate open access. For instance, the UC-Elsevier agreement is projected to make nearly 20% of all UC-authored articles open access at the time of publication. This is a significant leap from previous levels and undeniably improves access for readers outside the major research institutions. The promise is clear: large-scale, accelerated transition driven by the collective negotiating power of institutions.

The agreements also offer a predictable budget for institutions. Instead of scrambling to find funds for unpredictable, article-by-article APCs, the library can manage one large, predetermined fee. This administrative ease is a huge selling point, particularly for institutions with a high research output. Furthermore, for authors, the process is streamlined. They no longer have to seek external funding or pay out of pocket to publish their work open access in a high-impact, prestigious journal, a situation that often penalizes researchers from less-funded institutions or early-career scholars. The promise, therefore, is not just about open access, but about making the transition financially and administratively smoother for the most prolific research entities.

The Financial Reality: Shifting, Not Reducing, Costs

Despite the grand ambition, the most significant criticism leveled at Transformative Agreements is that they are not, in fact, cost-neutral or truly “transformative” in the financial sense. They often represent a dramatic shift in expenditure, rather than a meaningful reduction in the overall cost of scholarly communication. Publishers have successfully argued that their new bundled fees must account for the value of the published output, which, coupled with their consistently high profit margins (often cited as being upwards of 35% for major players), results in new agreements that are frequently more expensive than the previous subscription-only deals.

Critiques of Transformative Agreements have raised concerns that institutions, particularly those dealing with large commercial publishers, may end up paying more under the new model. These deals often include annual price increases, commonly around 2–3%, which, over the course of a three-to-five-year agreement, can result in substantial cumulative cost growth. This pattern of escalating financial commitments is a recognized risk in multi-year transformative agreements, though outcomes can vary depending on the specific contractual terms and negotiation strategies. 

In many cases, institutions are now effectively paying the equivalent of their old subscription fee plus the full cost of all their authors’ APCs, albeit under a single invoice. This is merely a reallocation of institutional funds, diverting money from one budget silo to another, and ultimately reinforces the publisher’s dominant position by guaranteeing their revenue stream for both reading and publishing.

Moreover, the entire structure is built on the existing, inflated subscription pricing. Transformative Agreements essentially validate the historically high subscription costs by using them as the baseline for the new “publish and read” fee. Rather than compelling publishers to lower the cost of their services, which are largely based on the freely provided labor of researchers (peer review, editing) and taxpayer-funded research, the agreements ensure the publishers maintain their premium pricing. 

To be truly transformative, an agreement should aim to break the existing financial structure, not just repackage it. The current model feels less like a transformation and more like a reaffirmation of the status quo, only now, some of the content is finally open access.

Equity and Exclusion: Who Gets to Publish Open Access?

One of the most insidious, yet often overlooked, critiques of the current Transformative Agreement model is its impact on global equity and smaller institutions. Transformative Agreements are predominantly negotiated by and for wealthy, research-intensive consortia in the Global North (Europe, North America, Australia). These institutions have the financial leverage and the sheer volume of publications to justify the massive, multi-million-dollar agreements. 

The benefit, in terms of free access, largely accrues to researchers and readers outside these rich institutions. The problem arises when considering the publishing side of the agreements. A Transformative Agreement typically covers the APCs for affiliated authors at the negotiating institution. A researcher at a well-funded US university can now publish open access for free. 

Conversely, a researcher at a smaller university or an institution in the Global South that cannot afford a multi-million-dollar Transformative Agreements is left in a worse position than before. They still cannot afford the subscription to read much of the content (unless it’s an article covered by an agreement at a wealthy university), and now, if they want to publish open access in the same prestigious journal, they face the full, often exorbitant, $3,000 to $11,000 APC with no institutional support. This effectively creates a new form of publishing inequality, where the ability to publish immediately open access is largely determined by the financial power of one’s affiliated institution.

While many agreements include provisions for institutions to reduce their publishing output or cap the number of articles that can be published open access under the deal, this does little to address the systemic inequity. If the cap is reached, subsequent authors from the same institution either have to pay the full APC themselves or revert to publishing under a closed model. This reinforces a tiered system: institutions with deep pockets get preferential treatment for both reading and publishing, while the vast majority of global institutions are left footing the original bill or being shut out of the open access publishing market altogether. A truly transformative model would not just shift costs; it would fundamentally lower them to a sustainable, equitable level for all.

The Preservation of Prestige and Publisher Lock-in

Transformative Agreements are almost exclusively focused on journals published by the world’s largest, most established, and often criticized commercial academic publishers, such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis. This focus is strategic for both the institutions and the publishers. For institutions, it’s about making open access happen in the journals that researchers deem to be the most prestigious and high-impact. For publishers, it’s about using the established brand reputation of their journals to secure long-term revenue streams under the guise of an open access transition.

This dynamic has a highly problematic effect: it locks in the market dominance of the major commercial players. By signing multi-year, multi-million-dollar Transformative Agreements, institutions are essentially guaranteeing the financial health and supremacy of these behemoths for the foreseeable future. The money that could potentially be redirected towards funding smaller, innovative, truly non-profit, or Diamond Open Access initiatives (journals where there are no fees for either the author or the reader) is instead funneled directly back into the coffers of the very companies whose pricing practices necessitated the “transformation” in the first place. The money follows the prestige, and the prestige is currently held by the legacy publishers.

This lock-in slows down the development of genuinely alternative scholarly communication models. Why would a university or a funding body invest heavily in building a new, community-run publishing platform when they just spent tens of millions of dollars on a Transformative agreement that covers all their authors’ open access needs in the established journals? The irony is that the instruments meant to disrupt the publishing industry are, in their current form, acting as powerful stabilizers for the incumbents. The Transformative Agreements ensure the continuation of a revenue-generating mechanism, effectively swapping one form of costly gatekeeping (subscriptions) for another (APC funding mechanisms), thereby preserving the established publishing oligopoly.

The Role of Technology and the True Open Access Future

The ultimate transformation of academic publishing will not simply be a financial transaction; it must also be a technological one. While Transformative Agreements address the financial layer, they do little to advance the actual technology and infrastructure of scholarly communication. The future of truly open and sustainable publishing likely lies in models that completely decouple the prestige of the publication from the need for high-cost services. This includes moving toward community-owned infrastructure, preprint servers, and the aforementioned Diamond Open Access model.

The current system, even with Transformative Agreements, remains tied to the journal-centric structure. An article is published in a “journal,” which is then managed by a “publisher.” The cost of this management, including increasingly sophisticated publishing technologies such as advanced XML tagging, indexing, and persistent identifiers, is bundled into the high APCs. However, many of these technologies could be delivered at a fraction of the cost through non-profit, open-source, or cooperative infrastructure, such as the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) with its Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform.

For a true transformation, the focus needs to shift from negotiating read and publish deals with the commercial sector to actively funding and building alternative, open infrastructure. Imagine a world where all research institutions collectively funded a global, non-profit, technologically advanced publishing platform. The cost per article would drop dramatically, potentially down to a few hundred dollars to cover basic hosting, curation, and persistent identifiers. 

Until major funders and library consortia redirect significant portions of their budget away from Transformative Agreements and toward building this genuinely open infrastructure, these agreements will remain a high-cost detour rather than the final destination. The goal shouldn’t be to make commercial publishing open access; it should be to make scholarly communication a public good, run on public infrastructure.

Conclusion

Transformative Agreements were born of good intentions: to accelerate the shift to open access and resolve the egregious double-dipping practices of commercial publishers. They have certainly succeeded in making a large volume of research immediately and freely available to read, which is an undeniable win for the global scholarly community. However, in their current form, they represent a problematic, temporary solution rather than a true transformation.

The evidence points to Transformative Agreements often being financially unsustainable, failing to curb the high costs of commercial publishing, and merely substituting one expensive financial mechanism for another. More critically, they exacerbate global inequities by reinforcing a tiered system where publishing open access in prestigious journals is a privilege tied to an institution’s budget, and they solidify the market dominance of the very publishers they were meant to disrupt. 

To achieve genuine, sustainable, and equitable open access, the community must look beyond these high-cost, temporary deals. The real transformation will come when libraries, funders, and researchers stop focusing their financial resources on negotiating with incumbents and start collectively funding and building the public, non-profit, open infrastructure that makes scholarly communication a true, affordable public good. Until then, these transformative agreements are likely to remain merely transitional and far less transformative than their name suggests.

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