CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: transformative journal

  • What Was a Transformative Journal? (2021-2024)

    A transformative journal was a subscription or hybrid journal that formally committed to increasing its open-access (OA) content year-on-year and to flipping fully to OA once a set threshold was reached. cOAlition S, the international funder consortium behind Plan S, ran the framework from 2021 to 2024 as a bridge for legacy subscription titles, then withdrew financial support after most titles failed to hit their compliance targets. This article explains what qualified, why the model was retired, and what cOAlition S funds in its place.

    A transformative journal (TJ) is best defined in cOAlition S’s own terms: “a subscription/hybrid journal that is actively committed to transitioning to a fully Open Access journal,” required to grow its OA share annually and to offset subscription income against publishing fees so institutions were not charged twice.

    What was a Transformative Journal, exactly?

    A Transformative Journal was a formally recognised category within Plan S compliance, distinct from an ordinary hybrid title. To qualify and retain status, a journal had to meet three binding conditions set out in cOAlition S’s published criteria:

    • Grow its OA share by at least 5 percentage points in absolute terms and 15% in relative terms every year, measured on Version of Record articles published under a CC BY licence.
    • Commit to flip to full and immediate OA once its content reached a 75% open-access threshold, with no fixed flip date required after 2020 revisions to the criteria.
    • Publish transparent pricing and offset subscription income against publication fees, to avoid “double-dipping” — charging both a subscription and an article processing charge (APC) for the same content.

    Journals that missed their annual target were removed from the programme the following January, at which point the Journal Checker Tool (JCT) — the tool researchers used to verify a compliant publishing route — stopped listing them as a valid Plan S option.

    How did Transformative Journals differ from hybrid journals?

    cOAlition S drew a sharp line between an ordinary hybrid journal and a Transformative Journal because ordinary hybrid titles had, in its own analysis, failed as a transition mechanism. The table below sets out the practical distinctions.

    Feature Ordinary hybrid journal Transformative Journal (2021-2024) Transformative Agreement (Read & Publish)
    OA growth obligation None ≥5 pts absolute / ≥15% relative, yearly Negotiated institution-by-institution
    Flip commitment None Full OA once 75% threshold reached Varies by contract term
    Plan S compliant route No Yes, while status held Yes, for covered institutions
    Negotiated by N/A Publisher, applying to cOAlition S Library consortia / country bodies
    Funder financial support N/A Ended 31 December 2024 Ended 31 Dec 2024 for cOAlition S centrally; some national exceptions continue

    The distrust of hybrid publishing was rooted in hard flip data cOAlition S cited when justifying the Transformative Journal criteria: of Wiley’s roughly 1,600 journals, only eight had converted from subscription to full OA; of Elsevier’s stable of more than 2,200 titles, only seven had flipped. That track record is why the Transformative Journal framework layered binding annual KPIs and a hard funding deadline onto what had, for hybrid titles, been a voluntary and largely unfulfilled promise.

    Why did cOAlition S withdraw support in 2024?

    cOAlition S always treated Transformative Journal funding as temporary. The Plan S Implementation Guidance set 31 December 2024 as the outer limit from the outset, but the decisive announcement came on 26 January 2023, when cOAlition S confirmed it would end financial support for all transformative arrangements — both Transformative Journals and Transformative Agreements — after 2024, and would stop accepting new TJ applications from 30 June 2023.

    The compliance data behind that decision was stark. On 20 June 2023, cOAlition S removed 1,589 of 2,326 Transformative Journal titles — 68% of the entire programme — for failing their annual OA growth targets, as reported by Times Higher Education and Science. The same reporting found that only around 1% of TJ titles had flipped to full open access by January 2023, and just 695 titles (30%) had met or exceeded their growth KPI. A follow-up cOAlition S analysis of the 2023 reporting round found that 56% of the titles that survived the first cull still failed to hit their growth targets the following year.

    cOAlition S’s own explanation, published alongside the withdrawal announcement, is unambiguous: continuing to fund transformative arrangements beyond 2024 would “significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.” In other words, the model was retired not because open access growth stalled everywhere, but because the transitional bridge itself was at risk of becoming the destination.

    What replaced the Transformative Journal model?

    cOAlition S did not simply stop funding transitional routes; it redirected support toward mechanisms it judged more likely to deliver full and immediate OA. Three strands now dominate its compliance thinking:

    • Full-OA Publishing Agreements — a newer category of institution/consortium contract that funds publication only in venues making all peer-reviewed articles immediately open access, rather than a mixed subscription-plus-APC model.
    • Diamond and community-led OA — journals and platforms that charge neither authors nor readers, which cOAlition S now frames as the preferred long-term structural fix rather than a market-mediated transition.
    • Transparency tooling — continued use of the Journal Comparison Service for price transparency and the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy, which lets authors retain enough rights to deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript under CC BY regardless of a journal’s OA status.

    Transformative Agreements (Read & Publish deals negotiated by library consortia, such as the Jisc-Wiley and Bibsam-Elsevier deals) are treated differently from Transformative Journals: cOAlition S ended its own central financial backing after 2024 but explicitly left room for individual national funders to keep supporting Read & Publish agreements as part of domestic strategy, and library consortia retain the mandate to negotiate them.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What are transformative journals?

    Transformative journals were subscription or hybrid titles formally recognised by cOAlition S between 2021 and 2024 as a Plan S-compliant publishing route, conditional on hitting binding annual open-access growth targets and eventually flipping to full OA.

    How do transformative journals differ from hybrid journals?

    Unlike ordinary hybrid journals, which had no obligation to grow their OA share, Transformative Journals had to demonstrate measurable annual progress, avoid double payments through offsetting, and commit to a full OA flip — conditions enforced by removal from the Journal Checker Tool if missed.

    Why did cOAlition S withdraw support for transformative journals?

    cOAlition S withdrew support because most titles missed their targets — 68% were removed in June 2023 alone — and because continued funding risked making the “transitional” hybrid model permanent, contradicting Plan S’s core opposition to hybrid open access.

    What replaced the transformative journal model?

    cOAlition S redirected support toward Full-OA Publishing Agreements, diamond and community-led open-access publishing, and existing transparency tools such as the Journal Comparison Service and the Rights Retention Strategy, all aimed at immediate rather than gradual open access.

    What this means for institutions and researchers now

    For research administrators and library staff, the practical consequence is that Transformative Journal status is no longer a live Plan S compliance route: any title still listed as a former TJ in older guidance should be re-checked against the current Journal Checker Tool, since post-2024 publication fees for former TJ titles are not funder-covered unless the journal qualifies through another route, such as a live Transformative Agreement or full OA status.

    For authors funded by cOAlition S members, the safest compliance paths going forward are: publishing in a fully OA journal, publishing via an active Transformative Agreement negotiated by their institution or consortium, or depositing the Author Accepted Manuscript under the Rights Retention Strategy when neither applies. The retirement of the Transformative Journal category is a useful case study in how funder mandates evolve once evidence of a policy’s underperformance becomes clear — a pattern research administrators should expect to see repeated as other transitional open-access mechanisms face similar reviews before the end of the decade.

  • 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.