Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A consortium signs a pure publish deal with a fully OA publisher securing volume APC discounts.
- Is an instance
An institution centralises APC payments via a pure publish agreement and reports per-discipline distribution.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Calling a deal 'pure publish' while it also includes paywalled content access.
- Not an instance
A pure publish deal with no price-transparency or annual reporting clauses.
Editorial commentary
A pure publish agreement is a contract between an institution (or a consortium negotiating on institutions’ behalf) and a publisher covering only the open-access publication of that institution’s authors — with no bundled subscription reading access, because there is no subscription content to bundle. Pure publish deals are used specifically with fully open-access publishers, where every title is already open regardless of any agreement (PLOS, MDPI, Frontiers, and the fully-OA portions of larger publishers’ portfolios are typical counterparties).
What a pure publish deal typically negotiates
Because there is no reading-access component to trade against, pure publish agreements centre on the economics and administration of publishing itself: volume-based discounts on APCs, centralised invoicing so individual authors and departments are not separately billed, and — increasingly, as a condition consortia push for — price-transparency and annual reporting clauses covering how many articles were published and at what aggregate cost. This is what distinguishes a genuine pure publish deal from an informal understanding: the contractual specificity around discount structure, billing, and reporting is the operational substance, not just the “we publish with them a lot” relationship.
How it differs from Read-and-Publish agreements
A pure publish agreement should not be confused with a Read-and-Publish agreement (sometimes called a transformative agreement), which combines subscription-style reading access to a publisher’s paywalled content with open-access publishing rights for the institution’s authors, typically as a mechanism for converting an existing subscription relationship toward open access over time. A pure publish deal has no subscription-reading component to convert, because the counterparty publisher has no subscription content in the first place — the two agreement types solve different economic problems and apply to different classes of publisher. A related but distinct concept, a pure read agreement, is the inverse case (reading access with no publishing-rights component).
A knowledge-equity caveat worth stating explicitly
Pure publish deals, precisely because they optimise APC-based publishing at volume discount, can entrench author-facing-fee publishing as the default model if not paired with active institutional support for no-fee (diamond) open-access venues — a concern raised regularly in the open-access policy literature and worth an institution weighing when it negotiates one.
Worked example / counter-example
A university consortium signs a pure publish deal with a fully open-access publisher securing a 15% volume APC discount, central billing through the library, and an annual per-discipline publication report — that is a fully specified pure publish agreement. A “deal” that also grants staff reading access to a publisher’s separately paywalled journals is not a pure publish agreement — the reading-access component makes it a Read-and-Publish arrangement instead, regardless of what either party calls it.
References
- ESAC Initiative, open-access transformative-agreement registry and terminology guidance.
- SPARC, open-access contract resources.
Also known as
Publish-only deal
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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