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L ibrarians are increasingly coming to agree that the scholarly record should be open and available to anyone who seeks it without financial barriers. But the topic gets murkier when we ask the question: how. How do we open the full scholarly record? One of the swiftest ways to get a mass amount of scholarly articles opened up in a short period of time is through Transformative Agreements (TA). TAs can be attractive offerings to institutions with a need or a desire to make their scholarly output open.It is likely someone in your library has been asked by a commercial publisher if they are interested in signing a TA (sometimes called read-and-publish, publish-and-read, or pure publish deals). In these deals, a library pays a publisher to make some agreed upon number of works open access if the corresponding author is affiliated with the institution. Your library leadership holds probably one of three attitudes on this proposition: pragmatically in favor, ideologically opposed, or simply sort of confused about the whole thing.When scholars and scientists submit work to a commercial journal, the majority of those articles are going to sit behind a paywall unless an Article Processing Charge (APC) is paid to make it open. As librarians, we can help our faculty deposit their Author Accepted Manuscripts into an OA repository or guide them to a Diamond OA journal to begin with, but these efforts have not, so far, brought about a fully open scholarly record. While TAs do succeed at bringing down a good chunk of paywalls from around the commercially published output of authors at a single institution, not all eligible authors will take up the offer and more importantly, not all authors will be eligible. On balance, any upsides that TAs may present are negated by the normalization of paying-to-publish, posing huge problems for equity.I'll refrain from giving you the hard-sell against TAs when others have already done quite a good job of writing those arguments. 1,2,3 Suffice to say, this is not the sort of librarianship that I want to play a part in, where we spend vast sums of money to provide knowledge access for a select few in such a way that ends up excluding the many. But actually, that describes one of the primary roles of the academic library: traditional journal collection development. So how do we change all of our practices so that we secure participation with knowledge for everyone?

I'm glad we're keeping the meme alive here. Read & Let ReadSo what are TAs? But we are having you on this podcast, because you recently have written a few articles now about sort of transforming transformative agreements. So these like TAs have been discussed and circulated for, I think, long enough now to have a general sense of what they are and what they mean. But also, either not yet long enough, or maybe too long to have like a loose definition and application. So maybe we could start off with like, from your perspective, what are transformative agreements, and how are they being used in a library context? And then how sort of does this current ecosystem of TAs and APCs motivate the Read & Let Read model that you've proposed? AJ Boston 02:13Thank you for letting me talk about Read & Let Read, which is an idea that, as you note, I won't shut up about.It is kind of born out of an ecosystem where we have transformative agreements -also known as read and publish deals, or publish and read deals. They're kind of in a funny space of awareness. A lot of people know what they are, some people have no idea what they are. And some people are just like, kind of confused by the whole idea. A lot of librarians get a lot of vendor emails, asking to see if they're interested in signing up. I saw a vendor email the other day (I won't say who it was sent to) but it was a vendor asking for a quote about how they how their school or the their library enjoys their TA. But they don't have a TA with that publisher.Transformative agreements are kind of like subscription deals for a library or institution to have some pre agreed some set number of article processing charges to be paid for in the upcoming year. Schools and research institutions especially will pay processing charges to make their faculty works open access. And this is kind of like a bundle deal that gets them that cuts them a little bit of a discount.At the time of the tweet, AJ had changed his name to "CEO of Elsevier" in response to company acquisition drama.

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement. Librarian-instructors may find the completed worksheets to be useful aids to supplement copyright lectures; student perspectives will be integral because they are generating the examples used in discussion. Although a scholarly communication librarian developed this exercise to help introduce some basic copyright information to an undergraduate studio art and design class, the exercise can be performed in a general educational setting.

Popcast is a freely-available weekly podcast produced by the New York Times , hosted primarily by music critic Jon Caramanica. Episodes from August 2015 to present are available to stream on the Times website, and through Apple and Google. Episodes dating back to August 2014 are available exclusively through Spotify Premium. Hip-hop music is a prominent subject, but a variety of genres are covered, along with industry, cultural, and technological trends. Guest with pop culture expertise often appear (e.g. Jia Tolentino, Jenna Wortham, Wesley Morris); they regularly bring race and gender perspectives alternative to the host's white, cisgender male.The program is an outstanding site of scholarship on pop music in the online-era.Librarians broadly concerned with pop culture may additionally find the show to be broadly applicable to issues in scholarly communications. Copyright, metrics, and preservation are all covered, if only in the context of Charlie Puth and Ariana Grande. Personally speaking, listening to Popcast , since 2016, has been surprisingly informative in developing my professional understanding of the research publishing industry. The utility of this connection inspired me to write a full article. 1 Boston 2