In this webinar (one hour) hosted by the EIFL Licensing Programme, Colleen Campbell from the Open Access 2020 (OA2020) Initiative gives an introduction to transformative agreements. These are agreements between library consortia and publishers that combine subscription fees for accessing publisher’s content with publishing costs (Article Processing Charges) that apply when authors publish articles in open access. The goal of a transformative agreement is to shift the expenditure from subscription fees to publishing fees, with the intent to make all scientific publications available in open access, for everyone.

Colleen provides some background to why library consortia started negotiating transformative agreements with commercial publishers, explains about the different types of transformative agreements (such as publish and read agreements and offsetting agreements), and talks about what information consortia should be looking at if they want to start negotiating these kinds of agreements with publishers. Colleen also provides an update from countries that have negotiated transformative agreements.

Supporting material

• Download the slides from the webinar (PPT)
• Transformative agreements (ESAC Initiative - esac-initiative.org/)
• Data on A​rticle Processing Charges (OpenAPC Initiative)
• Learn more about the OA2020 Initiative
• Join the OA2020 Community listserv: contact@oa2020.org