Transformative agreements; migrating scholarly communication: Home

Transformative Agreements, also known as a "Read and Publish" agreements,  are centrally negotiated agreements between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers in which former subscription expenditures are repurposed and channeled to support open access publishing.  It is a transformation of the business model to disinvest from the subscription paywall system of publication and to incorporate the gold open access charges (or Author Publication Charges, APC's) into the subscription fees that the library pays to the publisher. The aim is to make published research open access for all, and in the process, also manage the gold open access charges required. 

SANLiC (South African National Library & Information Consortium) has negotiated transformative agreements on behalf of South African university libraries and the first agreements became active in 2021. 

In 2021, the Unisa Library and Information Services signed and implemented its first transformative agreement, whereby any accepted article by a Unisa researcher, is automatically published as gold open access. 

Unisa authors can publish open access with the following publishers:  

• American Chemical Society (ACS)
• Association of Computing Machinery (ACM Open)
• Cambridge University Press Journals 
• Emerald Publishing
• Institute of Physics IOPScience Extra
• Oxford University Press Journals
• Royal Society
• Royal Society of Chemistry Journals (new from 2024+)
• Sage Journals
• ScienceDirect (Elsevier)
• Springer Nature 
• Taylor & Francis Journals Open Select (new form 2024+)
• Wiley & Hindawi 

There are a number of publication options available from publishers, and most offer a mixture of available options: 

  Green open access: option from publishers to allow self-archiving of the post-print version of articles by authors in an institutional repository. 

  Gold open access:  all articles and related content available for free immediately upon acceptance on the journal's website. 

 Hybrid open access: journals contain a mixture of gold and green open access articles. Publishers designate journals in their collections that allow for hybrid open access. 

Publishing articles as gold open access will: 

• make articles available to read and use immediately upon publication for everybody
• retain the copyright to your articles and the right to be properly cited and acknowledged
• promote the impact of your research and increased citations 
• increase author and institutional visibility
• enable you to comply with funding requirements 
• reduce publication costs

To be eligible, Unisa authors should submit articles: 

• Through the publisher's submission system from the selected journal home page 
• Have a corresponding author affiliated with the University of South Africa
• Be original research, eligible article types are research articles, review articles, rapid communications, brief reports and case reports
• Be accepted for publication from that starting date of the agreement

Read more about transformative agreements at Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges, ESAC:: Transformative agreements explained