Transformative agreements have a crucial role to play in the transition to open access, and while they may not fix structural problems, they are a reflection of the dynamic publishing landscape and the diverse needs of the academic community.
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Over the past several years, transformative agreements (TAs) have come to represent both a promising mechanism for challenging the entrenched financial streams of subscription paywalls and a lightning rod for criticism for just about everything that is considered wrong with scholarly communications.
Critics raise concerns that TAs disproportionately benefit the largest commercial publishers, consolidating their market dominance. Other see TAs as reinforcing the pay-to-publish model, voicing the critique that article processing charge- (APC-) based open access publishing simply trades one barrier for another and that publication-based pricing models create incentives for publishers to decrease quality measures in order to increase article volume and maximize profits. In addition, some see TAs as a continuation of “big deals” that tie up increasing portions of library budgets and limit flexibility to support other, emerging open access (OA) business models.
Yet the data show that TAs are a net improvement on the previous state of affairs. Institutions and research communities negotiating TAs are making unprecedented levels of new research publicly available, eliminating author-facing APCs and generating substantial savings (Brayman et al., 2024), curtailing the potential of commercial publishers to monetize the works of authors, increasing transparency around the financial streams of scholarly publishing, and optimizing OA publishing workflows with community-driven standards.
How can a library strategy that, according to TIME magazine, helped make the world a better place (TIME Staff, 2023) spark controversy, polarization, and hostile debate?
The crux of the issue is that while TAs were initially envisioned as a straightforward strategy to shift subscription paywalls to open access, their implementation is running up against the deeper complexities of the dominant scholarly publishing system, including inequities in access, funding, and global representation, as well as inertia.
Yet, it is through the iterative process of developing and refining TAs that we have finally begun to confront and address these challenges, as the experience of the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), a central service unit of the Max Planck Society (MPG), where I serve as head of scientific information provision, demonstrates.
TAs emerged as a library licensing strategy some ten years ago against a backdrop of slow progress in the open access transition, when, despite decades of effort invested in developing strategies for achieving open access, paywalls still persisted as the dominant business model in scholarly publishing. Looking at the landscape now, it seems that the subscription model not only remains healthy, but in some ways, even shows signs of revival.
Recent analysis by Delta Think reveals that while about 50 percent of journal articles were published open access in 2023, OA publishing accounts for only around 20 percent of publisher revenues in the ca. $11 billion scholarly journals market.
There are two key takeaways from this insight:
While concerns about APCs are genuine, in particular the risk that author-facing APCs replace one barrier with another, the perpetuation of paywalls in the form of the subscription business model is a far greater challenge. Indeed, the rationale for TAs lies in acknowledging the need to reorganize institutional investments in scholarly journal publishing in order to directly confront and dismantle the traditional subscription business model.
Over the past decades, as demand for open access grew, subscription publishers introduced the hybrid open access model, offering to publish individual articles as open access in subscription journals for an additional fee. This practice of "double dipping" created two separate payment streams to publishers (see e.g. Lawson et al., 2016), with hybrid OA fees, mostly outside of library oversight and control, exponentially increasing costs for research communities at the institution or country level.
TAs are grounded in the principle that transforming subscription-based journals to open access would not require additional funding, essentially making the case against hybrid APCs that come on top of library subscription fees; rather, they call for a reorganization of library subscription investments around open access. As Schimmer et al. noted in the so-called MPDL White Paper, “Innovation in the payment of publication costs cannot be fully expanded unless subscription costs are simultaneously eliminated or systematically transformed. The libraries’ existing acquisition budgets must therefore be the crucial fiscal reservoir for such a transformation” (2015, p. 4.).
The MPDL White Paper’s robust data analysis showed for the first time that the subscription system was already sufficiently financed by institutions to support a large-scale transition to open access without author-facing APCs. However, this idea wasn’t entirely new. Peter Suber, in his seminal work Open Access, made the very same argument: “To support a full range of high-quality OA journals, we don't need new money. We only need to redirect money we’re currently spending on peer-reviewed toll-access journals” (Suber, 2012, p. 145).
In their early iterations, TAs shifted the scholarly publishing landscape by merging subscriptions and OA payments into a unified framework under the control of libraries and library consortia. By stepping into the arena of open access publishing (not just by negotiating TAs, but with a series of other actions as well), libraries expanded the scope of their service offering and set in motion a process that redefined their role in scholarly communication into one that enables them to actively shape the publishing landscape (Campbell et al., 2022).
In this way, open access publishing became an integral part of library acquisitions. These agreements provided a structure to redirect payment streams and establish new workflows, offering valuable insights to institutions preparing for a fully open paradigm. Since their introduction, TAs have enabled countries, consortia, and libraries worldwide to rapidly transition publications by their researchers to OA. By taking responsibility for the costs of open publishing, they eliminated the uncontrolled rise of author-facing hybrid APCs and demonstrated to publishers that there were viable business models other than simply collecting subscription fees for content behind a paywall.
When they first started negotiating TAs, libraries and consortia faced significant resistance from major publishers who were reluctant to give up the lucrative arrangement of separate financial streams for subscriptions and open access in favor of a single agreement under the oversight of libraries. This resistance led to widespread subscription cancellations in countries such as Germany (including the Max Planck Society among hundreds of other institutions), Sweden, Norway, and Hungary, and institutions including the University of California. These cancellations affirmed the commitment of libraries and consortia to push for systemic change.
The early stages of TAs also gave rise to tools such as the ESAC Registry of Transformative Agreements and ESAC Market Watch and to several communities of practice. By sharing valuable insights and joint capacity-building initiatives and fostering a new level of transparency and collaboration, these communities have played a critical role in advancing the open access movement and refining the guidelines and structures that support it.
Dozens of publishers reacted to the growing demand for OA, integrating TAs into their business strategies as they sought to minimize attrition and grow revenue. Tweaking the model to serve their own interests, publishers now sell TAs as a product of their own. As a result, many libraries encounter TAs for the first time as an offer from publishers. It's no wonder that a significant portion of the library community has come to view TAs as a mechanism designed to entrench the position of for-profit publishers. Such perceptions lead to distrust of those who sign these agreements, who may be seen as complicit in reinforcing the dominance of large publishers.
At this stage, many TAs rely on up-front payments or lump sums and usually include a fixed number of or caps on annual OA publishing entitlements. They often incorporate two distinct fee components, one for reading and one for OA publishing. While the goal is for open access publishing to become the primary cost component over the course of one or more agreement cycles, the legacy fees for accessing a publisher’s content often remain a significant component of the overall agreement costs.
The basic structure of TAs provides a comprehensive approach with strong incentives for both institutions and publishers. Publishers benefit from maintaining stable revenue streams that enable a smooth transition to new OA business models. Institutions significantly increase the proportion of their new research outputs made immediately and publicly accessible, enable authors to retain use and re-use rights for their own work, and eliminate author-facing APCs in the same journals, not to mention gaining experience and skills in navigating new OA workflows.
However, for the early adopters who helped shape the concept of TAs, one thing was always clear: if we do not move away from fixed article caps financed by pre-payment models, we risk locking ourselves into the entrenched logic of big deal subscriptions. This is why we cannot allow the early iterations of TAs to become the standard for the future.
The ESAC Spectrum (ESAC Initiative, 2022) sets out a roadmap for how agreements can evolve toward a second stage, in which contracts cover OA publishing rights, payment models, risk-sharing mechanisms, sustainability, OA workflows, transparency, and commitment to the transition to OA.
While the cost-neutral agreements of the first phase of TAs offered institutions and publishers an easy way to “get in” and introduced transparency and oversight around all financial streams, the next phase of our approach is aimed at reorganizing subscription budgets and definitively moving away from legacy print spend. We can achieve this by introducing objective, data-driven cost criteria, namely aligning investments with the actual number of articles published under an agreement.
To this end, an effective way to prevent TAs from becoming the next ‘big deal’ and keeping libraries stuck in transition is to unbundle fixed lump-sum OA payments or capped OA article allowances and adopt a post-payment model. This way, investments can be linked, objectively, to the actual number of articles published, supported by standardized workflows and verification methods, as well as robust metadata. This shift would ensure that fees are allocated based on actual publishing activity or services rendered under agreements, rather than being tied to predetermined quotas rooted in publishers’ legacy revenue expectations.
Entry-level TA negotiations are commonly based on historical subscription costs, but in an OA-only business model reading fees become obsolete. Consequently, to definitively leave behind legacy paywall fee structures, another important step is to phase out all reading fees from TAs, either at the outset or gradually over the course of one or more agreement cycles. We are already seeing this strategy materializing in the negotiations of several first movers, such as the Swedish Bibsam consortium, which is now actively negotiating agreements for publishing as a service (Widmark, 2024), and the Max Planck Digital Library, to which I will return later.
With subscriptions and capped, pre-paid TAs, institutional payments are locked in for long periods of time, limiting the flexibility of institutions to invest their money strategically in open access. But with post-payment models, libraries can guarantee that their financial commitments align directly with the publishing preferences of their authors, allowing them to allocate resources in line with their mission.
Post-payment models liberate institutional budgets, allowing funds to follow authors wherever they publish.
Researchers tend to have strong ties with established journals, which are often seen as representing the communities of their discipline, providing essential functions such as curation, selection, and quality assurance. When choosing where to submit their work, on top of OA considerations, authors weigh factors such as the journal’s perceived quality and reputation, fit with the journal’s scope, audience, impact factors, likelihood of acceptance, time from submission to publication, the editor, or the composition of the editorial board (Smith et al., 2016; Tenopir et al., 2016).
In this context, TAs are also a response to the lessons learned from past challenges with many funder open access mandates. The slow progress of the open access movement in recent decades can largely be attributed to the burden placed on researchers, who faced rapidly changing and often conflicting requirements that significantly increased the time and effort they spent on compliance, making the transition to new publishing models and platforms difficult or impossible.
By contrast, TAs provide authors with the opportunity and means to publish their articles open access within their natural environment and without additional administrative burden. Instead of forcing a behavioral change in authors, negotiating open access publishing options in the journals they value and trust brings open access to them, minimizing friction and maximizing engagement.
The MPDL was an early adopter of TAs as a strategy for transforming the way we support the scholarly publishing needs of our researchers, and we have been actively involved in the discussions that have shaped their evolution.
We successfully entered the transition phase with cost-neutral TAs, but it soon became apparent that a fundamental shift from traditional pre-payment models to agreements with post-payment components was needed to make the transition financially sustainable. As the focus of agreements shifted from ‘reading’ to ‘open access publishing,’ it became clear that our former subscription investments with any given publisher were not necessarily in sync with the actual publishing output of our researchers. Consequently, we needed to look strategically at our budget—and the publishing trends of our authors—to assess how we could move to a model where we paid our fair share based on publishing output. This strategic assessment led to a negotiation approach focused on reallocating funds to open access publishing services, enabling us to reduce spending with publishers whose high—and opaque—subscription fees led us to be overinvested and redirect funds to areas that needed investment, allowing our acquisition budget to follow our authors.
The nationwide agreements negotiated for hundreds of German public institutions under Projekt DEAL(see e.g. MPDL Services gGmbH, 2024), which introduced the concept of the PAR (Publish and Read) fee and established a framework for compensating publishers on an article basis, provided a significant boost to our approach. But far from focusing only on the large publishers covered by DEAL, we’ve deliberately extended our agreements to cover the majority of publishers important to our authors, from the largest to the smallest, thereby leveling the playing field of support for OA publishing and ensuring that funds are available wherever our authors choose to publish.
This shift was not without its challenges. It required years of preparation; we had to build capacity within our team to effectively manage open access transactions and process thousands of articles each year, and we had to transform our budget into a flexible information budget oriented around open access (see German Science and Humanities Council, 2022). We had to work closely with multiple stakeholders, and at times had to take bold steps in negotiations, including the cancellation of some agreements. But the rewards have been substantial.
In our strategy, TAs play a crucial role in moving away from subscription logic, reducing investments in traditional journal subscriptions where possible, and reallocating resources to support a wider range of OA models.
While TAs play a crucial role, they are not exclusive: our strategy reflects the diversity of the publishing landscape and the preferences of the community we serve; this includes not only broadening our portfolio of centrally negotiated open access publishing agreements to cover more fully OA journals, but also supporting emerging models such as diamond OA, communities offering preprint reviews, collaborative OA book models, Subscribe to Open, and open infrastructures.
Under the traditional subscription model—and under current TAs based on lump sums and pre-payments—where budgets are locked up, our ability to support these diverse models would be severely constrained, if not outright impossible. Our experience shows that choosing between supporting different OA business models and TAs is a false dichotomy, and that one approach does not preclude the other.
Changing an entire publishing culture rooted in quantitative metrics or flipping entire portfolios and journals to open access may be outside the realm of power of our library. But we can organize our investments to realize the Max Planck Society’s goal of immediate and unrestricted access to 100 percent of the results of our research.
The experience of the MPDL challenges the common belief that TAs are simply a continuation of “big deals” and that integrating them into library strategies will eventually consume the library budget (Verbeke & Brundy, 2024). In reality, it is subscription logic that restricts flexibility by locking in institutional payments, thereby hindering the ability to adapt to the (sometimes very rapidly) evolving publishing needs of authors.
The MPDL’s approach demonstrates that when funds follow researchers, publishers compete on a level playing field. This systematic transformation of library budgets to align with authors’ publishing choices is not only possible, but has the potential to eradicate barriers by eliminating author-facing payments. The problem with APCs lies in their role as an add-on to an outdated subscription system that was already riddled with inequities. As the Delta Think graphic at the beginning of this article illustrates, subscriptions represent just as much, if not more, of a problem.
Some might argue that the well-funded, research-intensive nature of the Max Planck Society gives us certain privileges in negotiating TAs, making it easier for us to argue that scholarly publishing is an integral part of the research process and should be funded accordingly. And yet, our example illustrates how TAs have been successfully implemented without increasing overall costs, and offers insights that others, regardless of size or funding, can build upon. Our progress in this transition is the result of intentional strategic planning and negotiations grounded in robust data analysis—practical steps that don't necessarily require extensive resources and can be replicated in a broad range of institutions.
The increasingly global adoption of TAs demonstrates that libraries and consortia of all shapes, sizes, and regions can “get into” the transition with the resources currently at their disposal. To ultimately “get out” of the transition phase will require they reorganize their investment strategies (see e.g. Pinhasi & Kromp, 2024), placing authors and open access publishing services at the center. Managing transitions is never easy, but initiatives such as OA2020 and ESAC provide networks for sharing, learning, and support to ensure that negotiations remain relevant and meaningful for the communities they serve.
The transition to open access is challenging, and those working to address these challenges often find themselves in an uncomfortable position: confronted with resistance from those who remain invested in the status quo, while enduring bitter criticism from those who believe they are failing, aren’t doing it right, or aren’t going fast enough.
Do transformative open access negotiations address all of the shortcomings and inequities of scholarly publishing? Certainly not. The challenges we face are systemic, and we can’t expect that one approach will solve them all.
TAs may not fix structural problems or change research culture, but they can inject much-needed transparency into the current system of scholarly publishing, a positive outcome that invites accountability along with a push for further improvements. They shed light on the underlying issues and inform conversations about the development of future business models and modes of scholarly communication.
Achieving a future where research is freely accessible and shared without boundaries is a monumental task that will take time and perseverance. Each library can start by taking responsibility for its own investments and the needs of its authors. Together, we can contribute to this transition, fostering a more open, equitable, and dynamic future for scholarly communication, one agreement at a time.
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