Background
The University of California (UC) is committed to ensuring that UC publishing output is accessible to all. Open access (OA) 1) aligns with the university’s mission as a public institution, 2) empowers social, scientific, and economic innovation, and 3) complies with grant funder requirements.
With the adoption of the Systemwide Academic Senate Open Access Policy (July 2013), UC faculty demonstrated their commitment to “disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible.” In support of this policy, UC Libraries engaged in a project to facilitate the deposit of faculty articles into eScholarship, an OA repository.
The UC Presidential Open Access Policy (2015) expanded UC’s commitment to the wide dissemination of its research and scholarship to include scholarly articles written by any UC-employed author.
UC Libraries launched Project TRANSFORM to “negotiate and implement a set of transformative agreements with publishers of scholarly journals” to support OA publishing through “converting subscription spending to open access publishing spending.”
Transformative Agreements are a Pathway to Open Access
In Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement negotiations, existing subscription costs with publishers are transitioned to OA business models with a focus on reducing costs to UC. A key goal is to combine what libraries have spent on subscriptions with what authors are spending on article processing charges (APCs) into a single capped payment.
The Past Subscription Model
The Present/Future Transformative Agreements
- Single financial workflow
Most transformative agreements offer up to full coverage of the open access fees; others offer a discount. Common elements include:
- a discounted price for the OA fee /article processing charge (APC);
- a $1000 contribution from UC Libraries automatically applied toward the APC;
- the option for authors to receive full APC coverage from UC Libraries if they do not have sufficient research funds for OA publishing.
UC OA Publishing Agreements and Discounts, at the Office of Scholarly Communication, provides all agreement details and identifies journals eligible for OA publishing. As of April 2024, UC has transformative agreements with 16 publishers, making 55% of UC articles eligible for OA publishing.
Author Decisions & Experience
Authors determine where and with whom they will publish. If authors choose to publish OA under an agreement, the UC Libraries will automatically contribute a portion of the APC. Authors with available research funds are asked to pay the remainder. Authors without research funds may request full coverage from the UC Libraries. *If full payment is not available, it is due to extremely high APCs.
UC Libraries have worked with publishers to streamline publishing and payment workflow under most agreements.
- When an article is accepted, authors identify their UC affiliation in the publisher’s platform.
- Authors are notified of the UC agreement and the funding options available.
- Authors are presented with choices to 1) publish OA or subscription 2) if OA, whether to use research funds to contribute towards the APC or request full funding from the UC Libraries
- Authors who use available research funding receive an invoice for the APC remainder; authors who request full coverage from the UC Libraries do not.
Licenses & Rights
Authors are offered a license to apply to their publication. These are frequently applied creative commons (CC) licenses.
- CC BY 4.0 (default option) permits readers to share and adapt your article for any purpose, even commercially.
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 permits readers to share all/part of their article for non-commercial purposes. In some cases, permission from the publisher is required for a derivative version or commercial uses, even for uses by the author.
Existing Challenges
- Publisher portfolios can be complex with different journal imprints, scholarly society publications, and varying APC scales. While most journals in a publisher’s portfolio may be covered by a transformative agreement, some exceptions exist.
- While UC continuously seeks to expand the number of journals covered by open access agreements, not all publishers have an agreement with UC.
- UC’s transformative agreements depend on author participation to succeed, but not all authors are aware of the benefits offered to them. Spread the word!
Resources
Acknowledgment: Thanks to Mark Clemente and the California Digital Library (CDL) for graphics and content.
