CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: esac initiative

  • Transformative Agreements End: Diamond OA Pivot Under cOAlition S 2026–2030 Strategy

    cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy, published 12 November 2025, confirms that transformative agreements no longer sit at the centre of its open access policy: funders will not fund new transformative agreements by default (a position effective since 2025), and the coalition is redirecting policy attention and infrastructure investment toward diamond open access, preprints, and publish-review-curate models. For library consortia and research offices still budgeting around read-and-publish renewals, this is the point at which planning assumptions need to change.

    A transformative agreement is a contract negotiated between a library, national consortium, or regional grouping and a publisher that repurposes former subscription spending into payment for open access publishing services, intended as a temporary bridge from subscription access to a fully open access system rather than a permanent settlement.

    What Changed in cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 Strategy

    cOAlition S confirmed the end of its financial support for open access publishing under transformative arrangements after 31 December 2024, a position it first announced on 26 January 2023 and formalised in the Plan S Implementation Guidance. From 2025, participating funders stopped treating a transformative agreement as automatically compliant with Plan S; authors must instead demonstrate compliance through full open access publication, an independently negotiated agreement meeting transparency criteria, or rights retention.

    The coalition’s Strategy 2026–2030, released 12 November 2025, builds on that withdrawal rather than reversing it. The document sets three strategic priorities: strengthening the foundations of full, immediate, sustainable, and equitable open access (including a review of the Plan S principles to give explicit weight to publish-review-curate models, diamond open access, and preprints); supporting the digital infrastructures that make open access sustainable; and exploring financially sustainable, equitable publishing systems with formal monitoring of policy impact.

    Implementation runs in two phases: an initial two-year period from 2026 to 2027, followed by 2028–2030, with second-phase priorities to be set by the coalition’s Leaders Group based on what the first phase delivers. The coalition itself has grown considerably during this period, from 12 founding organisations at Plan S’s 2018 launch to 28 funders spanning Europe, North America, Jordan, Zambia, South Africa, and Australia.

    Why cOAlition S Is Moving Away From Transformative Agreements

    cOAlition S’s own reasoning is explicit: continuing to fund transformative arrangements indefinitely risked making them permanent, which the coalition has stated would perpetuate the hybrid open access model it has consistently opposed. Individual funders retain discretion to keep supporting transformative agreements as part of national strategies, and any such exceptions are published on the cOAlition S website, but this is now framed as an exception rather than the default route.

    Independent data on open access growth supports the coalition’s case that the market has moved on from where it stood when transformative agreements were designed. According to the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the share of articles, reviews, and conference papers published immediately as gold open access rose from 14% in 2014 to 40% in 2024, while the subscription-only share fell from 70% to 54% over the same decade. Gold open access, funded through article processing charges, is now the dominant open route — which is precisely the outcome the coalition says has intensified concerns about cost and equity, and pushed diamond open access up its agenda.

    Lidia Borrell-Damián, chair of the cOAlition S executive steering group and Secretary General of Science Europe, has summarised the shift directly: “We are trying to shift the market towards more diverse, sustainable approaches.” Not every commentator reads the pivot the same way. Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of the preprint server bioRxiv, has argued that Plan S has gone from being “fairly specific” — originally focused on flipping subscription journals through transformative agreements — to “rather vague,” now spanning preprints, alternative peer review, and diamond open access simultaneously.

    Open access route Who typically pays cOAlition S funder support, 2026–2030
    Transformative agreement (read & publish) Library or consortium, bundled with subscription Not funded as a default compliance route since 2025; national exceptions only
    Gold open access (APC) Author, institution, or funder, per article Recognised route; cost and equity impacts now formally monitored
    Rights retention (green OA + CC BY manuscript) No publishing fee; repository deposit Default compliance mechanism where no other route applies
    Diamond/platinum open access Universities, societies, funders, consortia infrastructure Named strategic priority; principles review and infrastructure investment
    Publish-review-curate (PRC) / preprints Funder or community infrastructure Included in the 2026–2027 principles review

    What Library Consortia and Research Offices Need to Renegotiate

    Consortia that built multi-year budgets around transformative agreement renewals now need to treat those renewals as contestable rather than routine. The practical work falls into a small number of categories.

    • Audit existing transformative agreements against cOAlition S’s current compliance rules, and flag which corresponding authors and grants are affected by the loss of default recognition.
    • Reopen consortium-level negotiations with publishers whose transformative agreements are approaching renewal, testing whether an independently negotiated, transparent read-and-publish deal or a conversion to full open access better serves the portfolio.
    • Reallocate a share of subscription and APC budgets toward diamond open access infrastructure — journal platforms, society publishing services, and consortium-run funds — in line with cOAlition S’s stated 2026–2027 priority of supporting digital publishing infrastructure.
    • Strengthen rights retention workflows so that manuscript deposit with a CC BY licence happens at submission, since this remains the fallback compliance route wherever a transformative agreement no longer applies.
    • Track the ESAC Initiative’s transformative agreement registry and national consortium reporting to benchmark negotiating positions against comparable institutions rather than negotiating in isolation.

    Institutions with mature identifier and metadata infrastructure — ORCID, DataCite, and CrossRef records consistently linked to funder awards — are better placed to demonstrate compliance under this more fragmented set of routes than institutions still relying on a publisher-reported transformative agreement dashboard.

    Answer-First Q&A: Transformative Agreements and Diamond Open Access

    What is a transformative agreement?

    A transformative agreement is an umbrella term, defined by the ESAC Initiative, for contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers that repurpose former subscription expenditure to remunerate publishers for open access publishing services, gradually shifting the underlying business model from toll access toward open access.

    What is a transformative journal?

    A transformative journal is a subscription or hybrid journal that commits to a defined trajectory toward full open access, including a rising share of open access content and offsetting subscription income against publishing fees. cOAlition S also withdrew financial recognition of this route after 2024.

    What is diamond open access?

    Diamond (or platinum) open access describes journals and platforms that charge no fee to either authors or readers, with publishing costs instead covered by universities, scholarly societies, funders, or library consortia. It is a named strategic priority in cOAlition S’s 2026–2030 strategy.

    Is a transformative agreement still Plan S compliant?

    A transformative agreement can still satisfy Plan S if it is published on an individual funder’s list of recognised exceptions for national strategies; otherwise, cOAlition S no longer treats it as automatically compliant, and authors must use full open access, an approved independent agreement, or rights retention instead.

    Implications and What Comes Next

    The near-term implication is budgetary and administrative: consortia negotiating transformative agreement renewals in 2026 and 2027 should expect publishers to resist unwinding these deals, since they remain commercially attractive, even as funder recognition narrows. The medium-term implication is structural: cOAlition S’s own strategy explicitly ties future funding priorities to diamond open access and shared infrastructure, meaning consortium budgets that continue flowing entirely through subscription-linked read-and-publish deals will increasingly diverge from where funder policy is heading.

    The second phase of the strategy, from 2028 to 2030, is not yet fixed; cOAlition S’s Leaders Group will set those priorities based on what the 2026–2027 principles review and infrastructure investments actually deliver. Institutions that use the next two years to build diamond open access contributions, tighten rights-retention deposit workflows, and maintain clean, linked identifier metadata will be negotiating from a position of readiness rather than catching up once the second phase is confirmed.

    See the CASRAI Dictionary for definitions of related open access and compliance terms, and the CASRAI research administration hub for broader compliance and infrastructure guidance.

  • Read and Publish Agreements: Meeting Plan S

    A read and publish agreement is a single institutional contract that bundles a library’s journal-subscription payments with its authors’ open-access publishing fees, so researchers publish open access without paying an individual Article Processing Charge (APC). It is one of several mechanisms institutions use to satisfy funder open-access mandates such as Plan S, alongside publish-and-read deals, transformative journals, and APC waivers.

    A read and publish agreement is defined by having two payment components in one contract: a fee for reading (subscription access) and a fee for publishing (open-access output) from the same institution to the same publisher.

    What is a read and publish agreement?

    A read and publish (RAP) agreement is a contract between a library or consortium and a publisher that consolidates two previously separate payment streams — subscription access and per-article open-access fees — into one negotiated sum. Corresponding authors affiliated with the subscribing institution can then publish open access in the publisher’s eligible journals without submitting an individual APC invoice.

    RAP contracts emerged from the broader category of transformative agreements: deals designed to shift a publisher’s revenue away from subscription reading and towards open-access publishing over a defined term. The Scholarly Kitchen’s 2019 primer on transformative agreements, still the reference framework cited across library literature, formalised the RAP/PAR distinction that libraries and publishers use today.

    • Eligibility is normally restricted to the corresponding author at a subscribing institution.
    • Coverage typically spans a publisher’s hybrid and fully open-access journal portfolio, though scope varies by contract.
    • Most agreements carry an annual article quota or budget cap; once exhausted, further OA publishing may require a separate APC or wait until the next contract year.

    How the model satisfies Plan S without per-article APCs

    Plan S, the policy coordinated by the funder consortium cOAlition S, requires that research outputs from participating funders be made immediately open access, either in a fully OA journal or platform, or via a compliant route within a subscription journal. A read and publish agreement satisfies this by making every eligible article OA on publication as a contractual default, removing the author’s need to source separate APC funding.

    Because the institution has already paid for publishing rights as part of the bundled fee, the author’s compliance obligation is met automatically at acceptance, provided the article falls within the agreement’s scope and quota. This is the core mechanic that distinguishes RAP deals from a standard hybrid-journal APC waiver, which still requires a case-by-case funding decision.

    cOAlition S’s Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S treats transformative agreements as a transitional compliance route, not a permanent end state. Under that guidance, newly negotiated transformative contracts concluded from 2020 were capped at a maximum three-year term and required a defined scenario for full conversion to open access once the contract expired — meaning agreements negotiated in this window needed a stated end date for reliance on the subscription-plus-publishing model, generally landing around 2024.

    Read-and-publish vs publish-and-read vs transformative journals

    Institutions encounter several related mechanisms that all aim at Plan S compliance but differ in who pays, for what, and how the cost falls across a consortium.

    Mechanism Payment structure Who bears cost in a consortium Typical compliance route
    Read-and-publish (RAP) Reading fee + publishing fee, bundled All member libraries share read-access cost Transformative agreement
    Publish-and-read (PAR) Publishing fee only; reading included Cost falls mainly on institutions whose authors publish Transformative agreement
    Transformative journal Per-article APC, but journal commits to OA growth targets Individual author/funder pays per article Direct Plan S-compliant route (time-limited by cOAlition S)
    APC waiver No payment; fee reduced or removed case-by-case Publisher absorbs cost, often for LMIC authors Discretionary, publisher- or policy-specific

    The Scholarly Kitchen’s framework draws the RAP/PAR line precisely: a Read-and-Publish agreement charges the publisher for both reading and publishing in one contract, while a Publish-and-Read agreement charges only for publishing, with reading access included at no further cost. Germany’s DEAL consortium agreement with Wiley illustrates the PAR variant concretely: the negotiated Publish&Read fee for hybrid open-access articles was set at €2,750 per article, fixed for the three-year term of the contract, with legacy subscription payments folded into that single per-article rate.

    Transformative journals are a distinct, narrower mechanism: individual hybrid journals commit to year-on-year OA growth targets in exchange for continued Plan S eligibility, but authors (or their funders) still pay a per-article APC — the mechanism a general RAP deal is specifically designed to avoid.

    Cost-recovery mechanics for libraries

    Libraries typically negotiate RAP and PAR deals with a cost-neutrality target: the new bundled fee should approximate prior subscription spend, redirected rather than added to. In practice, outcomes vary. Some negotiated agreements land close to cost-neutral; others increase total spend once publishing volume is factored in, particularly where no article-volume cap or price ceiling is agreed.

    The ESAC Initiative (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges), coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library, maintains a public registry of signed transformative agreements and a set of negotiation principles — cost transparency, author copyright retention (typically via a CC BY licence), and a defined transition pathway — that most library consortia now use as a negotiating baseline. In the UK, Jisc Collections’ Requirements for Transformative Open Access Agreements sets equivalent expectations for higher-education institutions negotiating on a national basis.

    Article Processing Charges outside a RAP contract remain the counterfactual libraries are trying to avoid. Analyses of Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)-listed gold OA titles have found APCs ranging from roughly $500 to $6,000, with an average close to $2,000 per article — a cost that scales directly with an institution’s publication volume when paid individually rather than bundled.

    • Cambridge University Press states its global transformative agreements let authors at over 1,000 institutions publish OA at no direct cost to the author.
    • UK consortium deals are negotiated centrally by Jisc; Australian and New Zealand deals are negotiated by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL).
    • Consortium-level PAR deals shift more of the cost burden onto institutions with higher publishing output, unlike RAP deals where read-access cost is shared more evenly.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is a read and publish agreement?

    A read and publish agreement is a contract in which a publisher receives a single bundled payment from a library or consortium covering both subscription reading access and open-access publishing fees for the institution’s corresponding authors. It replaces individual APC invoicing with one negotiated, institution-level cost.

    What is the meaning of “read and publish” versus “publish and read”?

    “Read and publish” means the publisher is paid separately for reading and publishing within one contract, whereas “publish and read” (PAR) means the publisher is paid only for publishing, with reading access supplied at no additional cost. The distinction affects how cost is apportioned across a library consortium.

    How much does the average APC cost?

    Gold open-access APCs typically range from around $500 to $6,000 per article, with studies of DOAJ-listed journals putting the average close to $2,000. A read and publish agreement absorbs this variable, per-article cost into one predictable annual institutional fee.

    Implications and outlook

    For research administrators, RAP and PAR agreements simplify Plan S compliance tracking: instead of monitoring individual APC waiver requests, the compliance question becomes whether a given journal and author fall within an already-signed contract’s scope and remaining quota. This shifts administrative effort from transaction-level approval to portfolio-level negotiation and monitoring.

    cOAlition S has consistently framed transformative agreements as transitional rather than terminal, with time-limited terms built into its Plan S guidance. Institutions relying on RAP or PAR deals should treat quota caps, contract renewal dates, and each publisher’s stated conversion pathway to full open access as the operational details that determine whether Plan S compliance holds for the full contract term — not an assumption that any signed agreement guarantees indefinite coverage.

    Research administrators evaluating a publisher’s OA agreement should check it against the institution’s affiliated research administration policy and confirm how corresponding-author eligibility is determined, since eligibility criteria are central to whether an individual article is actually covered — a determination closely tied to authorship and corresponding-author status on the submitted manuscript.