If not a transformative agreement, then what? Nine questions and answers about an alternative

Abstract

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?