A contract between an institution or consortium and a publisher that covers only the open-access publication of the institution's authors, without bundled subscription reading access.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

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

Pure publish agreements (also called 'Publish-and-Read' in some inverse formulations) are used with fully open-access publishers, where there is no subscription content to provide access to. Examples include institutional or consortium deals with PLOS, MDPI, Frontiers, and the BioMed Central portion of Springer Nature's portfolio. Pure publish deals typically negotiate volume discounts on APCs, central billing, and transparency reporting. From a knowledge-equity perspective, pure publish deals can entrench APC-based publishing if not paired with diamond OA support.

References

ESAC Initiative. SPARC OA contract resources.

Also known as

Publish-only deal

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Pure publish agreement"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/pure-publish-agreement" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/pure-publish-agreement",
  "name": "Pure publish agreement",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/pure-publish-agreement",
  "description": "A contract between an institution or consortium and a publisher that covers only the open-access publication of the institution's authors, without bundled subscription reading access.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/knowledge-equity#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/pure-publish-agreement",
  "sameAs": [
    "Publish-only deal"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:56",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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