Open access: Need to move away from transformative agreements

(Press-News.org) Sweden is far ahead when it comes to promoting open access to scholarly publications. But there is risk of getting stuck in a permanent transformation that favours large commercial publishers. A new report from the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions develops a strategy on how to work in negotiations with the publishers.

In 2021, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund, SUHF) convened a “Beyond transformative agreements” working group (the BTA group) to lay the foundation for further advancing the transition to open access. Now, the group has proposed a strategy for how Sweden – and the Bibsam Consortium – should operate in its negotiations with the publishers. The aim is to move away from transformative agreements to a financially sustainable system that stimulates the transition to a fully open publishing system.

The current publishing system has several flaws that negatively affect research, at the individual level (the researcher), and at the systemic level (Higher Education Institutions, HEIs and research funding).
“Subscribing to and publishing in scholarly journals is expensive, and costs are increasing. Additionally, the publishers' business model is based on researchers transferring the rights to their own work, despite the fact that in many cases this work is paid for with public funds”, says Astrid Söderbergh Widding, President of Stockholm University and chair of the BTA group.

In recent years, the national work on open access to scholarly publications has had a clear focus on signing read and publish agreements with the scholarly publishers (“transformative agreements”, TA) in order to reach the government's goal of immediate open access to findings of all publicly funded research. In Sweden the work has been successful because we signed transformative agreements with most major publishers. In 2022, 70 per cent of all articles in scholarly journals with at least one author from a Swedish HEI were open access.

These types of transformative agreements were signed with the hope that the publishers would convert more of their journals to fully open access journals. But that has not happened. The publishers are actively working to obtain income from both subscriptions and publishing, and they therefore see this type of agreement as a long-term solution.

“We run a substantial risk of getting stuck in a perpetual transformation that also contributes to increasing costs. At the European and global levels, transformative agreements have often served as the starting point for working more systematically with negotiations with publishers, as Sweden has now done for a long time,” says Wilhelm Widmark, Library Director at Stockholm University Library and member of the BTA group.

The BTA group contends that it is vital for control of scholarly publication to reside in the research community, while also emphasizing the need to reduce publication costs. The group’s primary recommendation is that the Bibsam Consortium should refrain from entering read and publish agreements in hybrid journals. Instead, it should only sign agreements for publication in fully open access journals. The group also propose complementary and supporting strategic initiatives and actions. These include:
* Signing agreements with publishers that only publish open access journals.
* Providing an independent publishing platform like Open Research Europe (ORE).
* Improving the opportunities for migrating researcher-owned journals from traditional publishers to other platforms.
* Continuing to work with copyright issues related to open access.

The Bibsam negotiating group has initiated discussions with a couple of the largest publishers about the need for a new form of agreement beyond transformative agreements, with the goal of only entering agreements for publishing as a service that is transparent and reasonably priced.

“An international discussion is needed on how we should move forward beyond the transformative agreements – here is Sweden's contribution to this discussion,” says Wilhelm Widmark.

Read the report Charting Sweden's path beyond transformative agreements – analysis and proposals for strategic direction

Contact
Wilhelm Widmark, Library Director at Stockholm University Library
E-mail: wilhelm.widmark@su.se Phone: 00468-16 27 33 or 004670 27 97 140

------

The group's recommendation regarding the basic strategic direction:

• The Bibsam Consortium should primarily not sign read and publish agreements in so-called hybrid journals, but instead only enter into agreements for publishing in fully open access journals. This approach should be implemented by 2026 at the latest, and it should apply to all fully open journals, regardless of the publisher.
For this position to be feasible in negotiations with publishers and to be implemented in practice, work with various complementary and supporting strategic initiatives and measures also needs to be carried out. This may include:
* Agreements with publishers that exclusively publish open access journals should be developed. Agreements should be designed to avoid profit maximization through large publication volumes, and it is important that such agreements do not encourage uncontrolled growth in the number of journals but rather promote the transformation of existing journals.
* Provide an independent publishing platform that also includes peer review of published articles. One possible route could be to join the EU platform, Open Research Europe (ORE).
* The possibilities for migrating researcher-owned journals from traditional publishers to other platforms should be expanded and encouraged.
* Continuing work on copyright issues for open access is important but dependent on international developments in the copyright field, mainly within the EU.
* Communication and engagement with both HEIs and researchers is crucial, both in terms of the problem at hand and the proposed measures.

END