The ESAC Initiative is the community reference point behind most transformative agreements (TAs) in scholarly publishing: it publishes the negotiation guidelines libraries and consortia cite when structuring a deal, and it operates the registry where signed agreements are made publicly discoverable. Where the transformative agreement entry in this dictionary defines what a TA is, this guide covers the organization that set the common definition and tracks how the model is actually being used worldwide.
What Is the ESAC Initiative?
ESAC (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges) began in 2014 as a project to bring consistency to how libraries and publishers structured, tracked, and reported open-access publishing costs, as institutional article processing charge (APC) spending grew alongside subscription spending. It is coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), the library and information-services arm of the Max Planck Society, which also produced the influential 2015 “Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model” white paper that helped set the intellectual groundwork for the transformative-agreement model itself.
ESAC describes itself as an open community of information professionals working to put the vision of open access into practice, rather than a formal standards body with binding authority. Its influence comes from adoption: national and regional consortia — including Projekt DEAL in Germany, UKB in the Netherlands, and FinELib in Finland — reference ESAC’s terminology, guidelines, and registry when they negotiate and report their own agreements, which has made ESAC’s framework the closest thing the field has to a shared vocabulary for this class of deal.
The ESAC Guidelines for Transformative Agreements
ESAC’s core guidelines set out what needs to be true of a deal for the community to treat it as a genuine transformative agreement rather than a relabeled subscription. The published guidelines cover five areas:
- Temporary and transitional by design. A TA is meant to enable “a swift and irreversible shift away from the subscription model,” not to function as a permanent replacement for one — it should have a defined end date and a stated transition logic, not renew indefinitely with no change in the underlying business model.
- Author copyright retention. Authors publishing under the agreement should retain copyright, typically with the publisher licensing the resulting articles under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
- Transparency. Costs, pricing models, and terms should be capable of being made publicly available, so the sector can benchmark deals against one another and track transition progress over time — this is the same transparency condition referenced in cOAlition S’s Plan S guidance on TAs.
- Cost containment and no double-dipping. Spending should stay broadly at existing subscription levels rather than adding open-access fees on top of unchanged subscription costs, and cost-neutral terms should be achievable for institutions of varying size, not just the largest consortia.
- Service and workflow governance. Publishers are expected to meet defined service and workflow requirements — API-based reporting, expedited manuscript identification, clear author communication — so administrators and authors are not left doing manual reconciliation to make the agreement usable in practice.
These five points function less like a certification checklist and more like a shared checklist that national bodies adapt locally: LIBER’s recommendations, the OA2020 Berlin conference statement, and various national consortium checklists all overlap heavily with ESAC’s guidelines while adding jurisdiction-specific detail (VAT treatment, national funder mandate compliance, language requirements). ESAC’s own negotiation principles page collects these parallel frameworks side by side rather than asserting a single global standard, which is a deliberate reflection of how fragmented TA negotiation still is across countries and consortia.
The ESAC Reference Guide: Preparation, Negotiation, Implementation
Beyond the five guidelines, ESAC maintains a longer Reference Guide to Transformative Agreements, built from a 2021 mapping exercise across the ESAC community, that walks a consortium through a TA’s full lifecycle in three phases:
- Preparation — profiling an institution’s or consortium’s existing publication volume and spend with a given publisher before negotiations start, so the resulting deal can be evaluated against actual usage rather than list price.
- Negotiation — structuring terms (pricing model, duration, transparency clauses, opt-in/opt-out rules for member institutions) using the guideline areas above as the checklist.
- Implementation — the operational side after signature: author eligibility workflows, manuscript identification and routing, usage and uptake reporting, and renewal or exit planning as the end date approaches.
ESAC also publishes a “How Transformative Is It?” spectrum, a lightweight self-assessment tool consortia and publishers can use to locate a specific deal somewhere between “subscription with token OA” and “fully transformative,” since not every agreement marketed as a TA meets the same bar on cost-neutrality, transparency, or actual publication-flipping progress.
The ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry
The registry is ESAC’s other main deliverable and the piece most directly cited elsewhere on this site: it is a community-submitted, publicly browsable database of signed open-access publishing agreements, covering not just transformative agreements in the strict sense but also Read-and-Publish, Publish-and-Read, publish-only, and other evolving mixed-model deals. For each entry, participating institutions and consortia can voluntarily disclose publisher, country/region, agreement duration, and — where the parties agree to publish it — pricing and cost terms.
Coverage has grown substantially since the registry’s early years: research published in 2025 analyzing the registry’s contents identified on the order of 1,300 agreements logged between libraries or consortia and the major commercial and society publishers. Because submission is voluntary and self-reported rather than independently audited, the registry should be read as the most complete publicly visible record of TA activity rather than a verified transaction ledger — some agreements are negotiated under confidentiality terms that keep them out of the registry entirely, and disclosed pricing detail varies by entry.
For a research administrator, the registry is most useful for two things: benchmarking a publisher’s typical TA terms before entering a negotiation, and tracking whether a specific publisher or consortium’s agreements are actually shifting content to open access over time — a question the underlying evidence on journal “flipping” remains mixed on, as noted in this site’s transformative agreement entry.
How ESAC’s Framework Shows Up in Real Agreements
ESAC’s guidelines are not self-enforcing — no publisher or consortium is contractually bound by them unless a specific funder or national mandate requires compliance (as Plan S did, for a period, for cOAlition S-funded research). Their practical influence shows up instead in how consortia structure and describe their own deals. National and regional bodies covered elsewhere on this site each publish their own negotiation checklists that visibly draw on the ESAC guideline areas — transparency, no double-dipping, defined transition terms — including Projekt DEAL, JUSTICE in Japan, UKB in the Netherlands, and FinELib in Finland. Most of these consortia also submit their signed agreements to the ESAC registry, which is part of what makes the registry a reasonably representative sample of global TA activity despite being voluntary.
ESAC, Plan S, and OA2020: How the Pieces Fit Together
These three names get conflated often enough that it is worth being explicit about the division of labor. Plan S, coordinated by cOAlition S, is a funder mandate: it required immediate open access for funded research and, for a period, recognized TAs meeting specific conditions (including reporting via the ESAC registry) as an acceptable transitional route, before ending dedicated Plan S funding support for TAs after 2024. OA2020 was an advocacy initiative and the venue for the 2018 Berlin conference statement that helped popularize the “flip subscription spending to OA spending” logic behind TAs generally. ESAC is neither a funder mandate nor an advocacy campaign — it is the operational layer: the guidelines, reference materials, and registry that consortia actually use when a mandate or advocacy goal has to be turned into a signed contract.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ESAC the same organization as Plan S or cOAlition S?
No. ESAC is an independent community initiative coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library; Plan S is a funder open-access mandate coordinated by cOAlition S. Plan S referenced ESAC’s registry as a reporting mechanism for TAs it recognized, but the two are governed and run separately.
Does ESAC certify or approve transformative agreements?
No. ESAC publishes guidelines and a self-assessment spectrum, and it hosts a voluntary registry, but it does not audit, certify, or approve individual agreements. Whether a specific deal meets ESAC’s guideline areas is a judgment consortia and observers make themselves.
Is submitting an agreement to the ESAC registry mandatory?
No, submission is voluntary. Some funder or national mandates have, at points, required registry reporting as a condition of recognizing an agreement as transformative, but ESAC itself does not compel disclosure, and confidentiality clauses in some contracts keep them out of the registry entirely.
How current is the registry’s agreement count?
The registry is continuously updated as institutions submit new agreements, so any specific count is a snapshot rather than a fixed figure. Check the ESAC Initiative’s transformative agreements page directly for the current total rather than relying on a cited figure from a point in time.
Related CASRAI Resources
- Transformative agreement (TA) — the underlying definition and Plan S context
- Read-and-Publish agreement
- Pure publish agreement
- Pure read agreement
- Plan S
- Read & Publish (Transformative) Agreements: How They Work for Authors
- Projekt DEAL: Germany’s National Publish-and-Read Consortium
- UKB and Universities of the Netherlands
- FinELib: Finland’s National Consortium
- JUSTICE: Japan’s University Library Consortium
