Faculty are Saving Thousands through Open Access Agreements from UTA Libraries!

In August, my colleague Amy Castillo, Director of Access and Discovery at UTA Libraries, explained and explored the open access agreements (also known as Read & Publish or “Transformative” agreements) that UTA Libraries holds with publishers as part of the Open @ UTA Libraries blog series. There is also explanatory information about these agreements on the UTA Libraries website. This post continues that conversation by summarizing the savings these open access agreements, and the work of UTA Libraries, has secured for UTA authors! 

As Amy describes, open access agreements seek to “transform” traditional models of research publication by ensuring that:  

1. Authors retain their copyright to their intellectual property 

2. Research is openly/globally accessible to more people than ever before at no cost 

3. Authors can attain double the citation rate for their publications, significantly increasing their scholarly impact 

To publish open access, publishers request up-front revenue, in the form of Article Processing Charges (APCs) or Book Processing Charges (BPCs), in lieu of long-term revenue from granting subscription access to publications over time. Unfortunately for researchers, these APCs can be quite expensive, averaging around $2500-$3000 for specialty journals and ranging above $10,000 for the highest-profile STEM journals. BPCs top $10,000 regularly and can skyrocket based on the publisher and potential market for the book. Authors with large grants write these publishing charges into their budgets (especially now that federal open access mandates are in place), and others use institutional research dollars or departmental support to fund these charges.  

But what about those who can’t afford to pay, such as graduate students, early career researchers, non-tenure stream faculty, or less-funded humanities and social science researchers? As is often the case, academic libraries step up! Like many other university libraries and consortia, UTA Libraries negotiates with publishers open to including publishing opportunities for affiliated researchers in our subscription costs. So, as the Libraries pays for read access to databases, journals, and e-books, we also preemptively cover open access processing charges for our researchers through Read & Publish agreements, as they make sense for our budget and community.  

These Read & Publish agreements range in cost depending on the publisher. For smaller outfits, they can be about $80,000 annually. For the largest and most powerful publishing conglomerates, they are millions of dollars (per library). Like our fellow academic libraries, UTA Libraries foots these bills on behalf of our researchers, attempting to get the most out of the dollars at our disposal, for both reading and publishing opportunities.  

You are probably asking yourself about how much such agreements save the researchers from having to pay out of pocket. Good question! Let’s look at the data.  

As of the writing of this blog post, the total savings for UTA-affiliated researchers through our three most used agreements (SAGE, Cambridge University Press [CUP], and Association for Computing Machinery [ACM]) amounts to approximately $215,000. This includes APC savings from 2021-2023 for both CUP and ACM and savings from 2023 for SAGE (the first year of the agreement). Refer to the table below for a breakdown of savings over the agreement years.  

FYI: UTA Libraries’ other current agreements not included here are either focused on discounted charges or on different open access models such as “Direct 2 Open” or “diamond” models. Refer to Amy’s original post for more on those differences.

These figures represent 120 separate publications that were/will be published immediately with open access for the global public. That means thousands more readers, hundreds more citations, and research dollars that can be used for direct research need. UTA Libraries continues to seek out the best open access agreements for our researchers, always weighing the give-and-take of what we get for what we pay. Our outlook includes adding more open access agreements to the portfolio to support more faculty on campus and continue the trajectory of UTA’s R1 emergence.  

We know that we certainly don’t cover every publishing need of UTA researchers with these agreements. While we continue to grow our repertoire of agreements, we have a pilot program called the Open Initiatives Grants for APCs and BPCs. We accept applications from UTA authors whose publication is not covered by our existing agreements and who do not have funding that should cover processing charges. 

For more information about open access agreements, including how to opt in for your publications, contact librariesops@uta.edu!