CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: jisc open access agreements

  • Read and Publish Agreements: UK Compliance Guide

    Read and publish agreements are a specific type of transformative agreement that bundle a library’s subscription-reading fee and its authors’ article processing charges (APCs) into one institutional payment, so corresponding authors publish open access without an individual invoice. This distinguishes them from the broader transformative-agreement category, which also includes publish-and-read and subscribe-to-open models, and matters now because cOAlition S has ended its funder support for hybrid open access delivered through these deals.

    A transformative agreement is any publisher-library contract designed to shift journal revenue away from pure subscriptions and towards open access publishing, typically tracked and standardised through the ESAC Initiative’s public registry. Read and publish (R&P) is the most common variant, but librarians increasingly encounter publish-and-read (P&R) and subscribe-to-open (S2O) structures that allocate cost and access differently. This guide sets out the terminology, the cOAlition S policy shift, and a practical compliance checklist for UK library and research-office staff.

    What Is a Read and Publish Agreement?

    A read and publish agreement replaces two separate invoices — a subscription fee and per-article APCs — with a single negotiated payment covering both. The library retains reading access to a publisher’s journal package, and eligible corresponding authors publish open access at no additional cost, subject to the deal’s terms.

    Cambridge University Press reports partnering with over 2,500 institutions globally under this model, with eligibility confirmed through an institutional checker rather than case-by-case approval. The Royal Society applies a comparable structure for CAUL institutions in Australia and New Zealand and for Vienna University, waiving the APC entirely for eligible papers.

    Most UK read and publish deals — including those with Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press and Cambridge — are negotiated nationally by Jisc, rather than by individual libraries.

    Read and Publish vs Transformative Agreements: What’s the Difference?

    Transformative agreement is the umbrella term; read and publish is one implementation of it. Treating the two as synonyms causes librarians to miss deals structured as publish-and-read or subscribe-to-open, which allocate payment differently and carry different compliance checks.

    Model Payment structure Who benefits UK-relevant examples
    Read and Publish (R&P) Single fee bundles subscription access plus author APCs Both readers and authors, in one contract Cambridge, OUP, Elsevier, Wiley (via Jisc)
    Publish and Read (P&R) Fee is calculated primarily on publishing volume; reading access is included Authors’ output drives the price; reading is a by-product Common in Springer Nature and Wiley consortial deals
    Subscribe to Open (S2O) Standard subscription fee; journal flips to open access if enough libraries retain it All readers globally, without an APC at all Annual Reviews titles; opt-in by UK libraries
    Generic transformative agreement Any of the above, logged with standard terms in the ESAC registry Varies by sub-type Umbrella category for all ESAC-registered deals

    The practical consequence: a librarian auditing “transformative agreements” must check the payment trigger for each individual contract, not assume every deal behaves like a read and publish agreement.

    How the ESAC Registry Standardises Transformative Agreement Terms

    The ESAC Initiative (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges) maintains a public registry of transformative agreements, logging each deal’s publisher, consortium, term dates and model type. It exists because early transformative agreements used inconsistent contract language, making cross-institutional comparison difficult for consortia and funders.

    ESAC-registered status does not guarantee funder compliance on its own — it confirms the deal’s terms are publicly documented in a standard format. Librarians should still verify a specific agreement’s eligibility rules and expiry against their own corresponding-author list, since registration reflects the publisher-consortium contract, not individual-author entitlement.

    Why cOAlition S Is Winding Down Support for Transformative Agreements

    cOAlition S — the international group of research funders behind Plan S, including UKRI as a founding member — built transformative agreements and Transformative Journals into Plan S as a temporary bridge from subscription to full open access. That bridge had an explicit end point: funder support for hybrid open access delivered through Transformative Agreements and Transformative Journals concluded at the end of 2024, per cOAlition S’s Plan S implementation guidance.

    The rationale: hybrid OA, where a subscription journal carries some open articles alongside paywalled ones, was never Plan S’s end state. Transformative agreements were funded only while publishers showed measurable progress toward full OA. cOAlition S’s subsequent “Towards Responsible Publishing” strategy shifts funder emphasis toward rights retention and diamond OA models that do not depend on APC-based transformative deals.

    This does not mean every transformative agreement disappears overnight. Individual member funders retain discretion to support specific national deals, and non-cOAlition-S funders continue negotiating independently — which is why UK librarians need an ongoing compliance process, not a one-off terminology check.

    UK Compliance Checklist for Librarians

    Use this checklist when auditing or renewing any read and publish or transformative agreement covering UK-funded research:

    • Confirm the deal’s ESAC registry entry, model type (R&P, P&R or S2O) and exact expiry date.
    • Verify corresponding-author eligibility rules — most publishers check institutional email domain or ROR-linked affiliation, not co-author status.
    • Track APC-equivalent usage against any annual cap; publish-and-read deals in particular can exhaust quotas faster than read-only estimates suggest.
    • Reconfirm whether the underlying funder is a cOAlition S member and, if so, whether the article’s funder still recognises hybrid OA via this route post-2024.
    • Cross-check the deal against Jisc’s national list rather than relying solely on the publisher’s own eligibility checker, since terms occasionally diverge.
    • Brief researchers on coverage and caps before submission, not after acceptance, when publication cannot be easily switched to a different route.
    • Log renewal or non-renewal decisions centrally, since cOAlition S’s reduced funder backing increases the chance that individual deals lapse rather than auto-renew.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is a read and publish agreement?

    A read and publish agreement is a transformative agreement in which a library’s subscription fee and its authors’ article processing charges are combined into a single institutional payment. Eligible corresponding authors then publish open access at no separate cost, provided they submit using their institutional affiliation before any usage cap is reached.

    What is the meaning of “read and publish”?

    The term describes the two rights an institution buys in one contract: the right to read a publisher’s subscription content, and the right for its authors to publish open access without individual APC invoices. It distinguishes this model from publish-and-read deals, where publishing volume — not reading access — sets the price.

    Are transformative agreements ending completely in 2026?

    No. cOAlition S has withdrawn funder-level financial endorsement of hybrid OA via transformative agreements after 2024, but individual publishers, consortia and non-cOAlition-S funders continue to negotiate and renew deals. Institutions should expect fewer new funder-backed agreements, not an immediate end to existing contracts.

    Do UK institutions still need Jisc-negotiated deals?

    Yes. Jisc remains the primary national negotiator for UK transformative agreements with major publishers, and most UK read and publish terms — eligibility, caps and pricing — are set through Jisc rather than by individual universities, regardless of cOAlition S’s funder-level policy changes.

    What This Means for UK Institutions

    UK institutions relying on transformative agreements to meet UKRI’s open access policy, which requires immediate open access for in-scope research articles, should treat cOAlition S’s reduced backing as a signal to diversify routes, not a reason to panic. Green open access via repository deposit, rights-retention strategies, and diamond OA venues matter more as funder-endorsed transformative agreements become less certain to renew on current terms.

    Expect renewal negotiations to take longer and terms to tighten, particularly for publish-and-read structures where output growth already strains usage caps. Building the checklist above into annual deal reviews, rather than a one-time terminology exercise, is the practical response.

    Conclusion: Preparing for the Post-Transformative-Agreement Era

    Read and publish agreements will not vanish in 2026, but the funder scaffolding that expanded them — cOAlition S’s Plan S support for hybrid OA — has been removed. UK librarians who can distinguish R&P from P&R and S2O, check ESAC registry status, and verify funder-specific eligibility will be better placed to advise researchers as individual deals renew, tighten or lapse over coming cycles.

    For related terminology, see the CASRAI Dictionary and the broader context on institutional open-research policy in research administration.

  • Jisc Open Access Agreements: A cOAlition S Compliance Route Map

    UK research administrators juggling funder mandates now face a genuinely confusing question: does a given Jisc open access agreement actually satisfy a cOAlition S-aligned funder’s Plan S requirement, or does it only cover the invoice? Jisc negotiates centrally on behalf of UK higher education institutions, but the resulting deals are not automatically interchangeable with Plan S’s own compliance routes — and conflating the two is a common source of avoidable non-compliance findings at grant closeout.

    This route map sets out, mechanism by mechanism, how Jisc’s negotiated agreements map onto cOAlition S’s three approved compliance routes and the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) open access policy, so research offices can advise authors with confidence rather than by rule of thumb.

    What Jisc open access agreements actually negotiate

    Jisc negotiates three broad categories of open access agreement on behalf of its member institutions, governed by the UUK/Jisc Research Licensing Strategy Group and informed explicitly by the principles of Plan S and the OA2020 initiative:

    • Transitional (transformative) agreements — convert existing subscription spend into a combined fund covering both continued read access and open access publishing costs at hybrid and subscription titles (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and others).
    • Fully open access agreements — membership or flat-fee arrangements with born-open-access and society publishers, including current deals with ACM (2026–2028), MDPI’s Institutional Open Access Program (2026–2027) and PLOS’s flat-fee and Community Action Publishing licences (2026–2027).
    • Compliant green agreements — publisher commitments to an immediate, embargo-free, CC BY-licensed repository deposit route for authors who cannot or do not use a paid option.

    Springer Nature alone reports over 100 UK institutions participating in its Jisc-negotiated agreement, illustrating the scale of collective bargaining involved. These agreement types are the practical instruments; the compliance routes they need to satisfy come from cOAlition S itself.

    The three cOAlition S Plan S compliance routes

    cOAlition S launched Plan S in 2018, with implementation beginning on 1 January 2021. Its implementation guidance sets out exactly three routes by which a funded output can be considered compliant. Understanding these routes independently of any single publisher deal is the foundation for everything that follows.

    Plan S route What it requires Typical publication type
    Route 1 — Open access venue Publish in a fully open access journal or platform, immediately available under CC BY Gold OA / Diamond OA journals
    Route 2 — Transformative arrangement Publish in a subscription/hybrid journal covered by a recognised transitional agreement Hybrid journals under a Jisc transitional deal
    Route 3 — Repository deposit Deposit the author accepted manuscript (or, increasingly, version of record) immediately, with no embargo and a CC BY licence, often invoking the Rights Retention Strategy Any subscription journal, including those with no Jisc deal at all

    Route 3 matters most for institutional risk management: it is the fallback that keeps every author compliant even when no Jisc agreement exists for their chosen journal, or when an agreement’s funding allocation has already been exhausted for the year.

    Matching Jisc agreement types to each compliance route

    Jisc’s own three agreement categories were designed with these routes in mind, but the mapping is not always one-to-one, and research offices need to check eligibility at the point of submission rather than assume coverage.

    Jisc agreement type Plan S route satisfied Practical caveat for research offices
    Fully open access agreement Route 1 (OA venue) Confirm the specific journal or platform is listed under the current licence, not just the publisher brand
    Transitional (transformative) agreement Route 2 (transformative arrangement) Fund caps and corresponding-author eligibility rules mean coverage can lapse mid-year
    Compliant green agreement Route 3 (repository deposit) Requires active AAM deposit workflow — Jisc’s Publications Router can automate metadata and full-text delivery to the repository

    UKRI, a founding cOAlition S funder, layers its own 2021 open access policy on top of this framework: immediate open access is required for journal articles and conference proceedings from grants awarded on or after 1 April 2022, and for monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024. UKRI’s policy is designed to align with Plan S principles but is administered separately — an author can be UKRI-compliant via the same Gold, transformative, or Green routes described above, but institutions must check UKRI’s specific embargo and licensing terms rather than assume Plan S compliance automatically satisfies UKRI, or vice versa.

    Common questions from UK research offices

    What is a read and publish deal?

    A read and publish deal is a single institutional agreement, usually negotiated by a consortium such as Jisc, that bundles subscription access to a publisher’s journals with funded open access publishing rights for eligible corresponding authors, replacing separate read and pay-to-publish invoices.

    What are the three routes to Plan S compliance?

    cOAlition S recognises three routes: publishing in a fully open access journal or platform; publishing in a subscription journal under a recognised transformative arrangement; or depositing the accepted manuscript in a repository immediately, with no embargo and a CC BY licence.

    Is the UKRI open access policy the same as Plan S?

    No. UKRI is a cOAlition S founding funder and designed its 2021 open access policy to align closely with Plan S principles, but the two are administered separately, with UKRI setting its own effective dates, embargo rules and licensing requirements that research offices must check independently.

    Is Jisc’s Open Policy Finder the same as the Journal Checker Tool?

    No — they are commonly confused. Open Policy Finder is Jisc’s own tool for checking publisher and funder policies, while the Journal Checker Tool is operated independently by cOAlition S at journalcheckertool.org to confirm a specific journal-institution-funder combination against Plan S routes.

    A practical compliance checklist

    Research offices advising authors on a submission should work through the following before a manuscript goes out:

    1. Confirm whether the funder is a cOAlition S signatory, and separately whether UKRI-specific terms also apply.
    2. Check the target journal against the current Jisc agreement list for the author’s institution and publisher — agreement coverage varies by title, not just by publisher.
    3. Run the combination through cOAlition S’s Journal Checker Tool to confirm which of the three routes applies before submission, not after acceptance.
    4. Monitor transitional agreement fund caps; many UK institutions see APC allocations exhausted before the calendar year ends.
    5. Maintain a documented Green-route fallback — immediate AAM deposit with a Rights Retention Statement — for any journal outside a live agreement.
    6. Record the compliance route used against each output for funder reporting and REF-adjacent audit trails.

    Implications for research offices

    The practical risk sits less in the headline agreements than in their edges: mid-year fund exhaustion on transitional deals, journals moving in or out of coverage between renewal cycles, and corresponding-author eligibility rules excluding co-authors at non-participating institutions. Jisc’s multi-year renewals — the ACM Open Journals agreement running 2026–2028, PLOS licences renewed for 2026–2027 — give planning stability, but offices should treat every agreement as time-bound and re-verify eligibility annually rather than relying on a static internal list.

    There is also a structural shift underway toward Subscribe to Open and community-based membership models, which remove per-article APC decisions entirely but still require a compliant Green fallback under current Jisc guidance, since S2O agreements depend on enough institutions subscribing to unlock full participation. For research administration teams building durable workflows, the safest design principle is to treat Route 3 — immediate repository deposit — as the permanent baseline, with Jisc’s negotiated Routes 1 and 2 as opportunistic upgrades rather than the primary compliance mechanism.

    Looking ahead

    As UKRI’s open access policy embeds further into monograph and long-form publishing and Jisc continues renewing its publisher portfolio, the institutions with the least audit risk will be those that stopped treating “which Jisc deal applies” as the first question. The first question should be which Plan S route the output needs to satisfy; the applicable Jisc agreement, if one exists, is simply the most convenient way to deliver it. Research offices that build their author guidance and internal tooling — including terminology drawn from a shared open access dictionary — around the three compliance routes, rather than around individual publisher brands, will adapt fastest as agreements are renegotiated, replaced or allowed to lapse.