Untangling Open Access Agreements

Special thanks to Dr. Leah McCurdy, Director of Open Partnerships & Services, and Jessica McClean, Director of Open Educational Resources, for their contributions to this post.

This post in our Open @ UTA Libraries blog series covers the What, Why, and Which of the open access agreement models we are currently engaged in to help UTA scholars publish their research openly. These are agreements between UTA Libraries and/or consortia of libraries, such as the UT System libraries, and publishers to support open access scholarly publishing and reader access. These agreements are managed by the UTA Libraries Access and Discovery department! The landscape of open access agreements continues to evolve, so you will see throughout this post that both the Libraries and our publisher partners are trying out various models and pilot programs.

A “traditional” agreement between a library and a publisher entails access to read publications within the entitled subscription for a library’s authorized users, often restricted to the campus community. This means that even publications submitted by the university’s scholars would only be available to those at institutions subscribed to that publisher’s product. This also often requires the university’s scholars giving up their copyright to the publisher. In this case, we’re usually talking about journal articles, but this can apply to books or other types of publications.

To allow broader and open access to an article for readers (without the paywall or requirement of being affiliated with a library that pays the subscription cost), some publishers adjusted to collecting Article-Processing Charges, or APCs, from the author or supporting organizations (including libraries) to make the content openly available, often with the author(s) retaining copyright and having a Creative Commons license applied. Over time, these so-called ‘transformative’ agreements became popular to help combine coverage of readership access and publication fees of open access content on behalf of affiliated authors together. One of my favorite go-to posts about transformative agreements was published in 2019 by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe titled “Transformative Agreements: A Primer” within The Scholarly Kitchen blog.  She helps break down definitions, key highlights, and types of transformative agreements, including “Read-and-Publish.” Over the years, the academic library community has been assessing whether such agreements are actually ‘transformative’ or not as discussed in “Transformative agreements: Do they pave the way to open access?” by Borrego, Anglada, and Abadal (2021).

While we do still have traditional agreements in place, we have some “Read-and-Publish” agreements with publishers where a portion of the library’s subscription pays for the APC in part or in whole for UTA corresponding authors to make journal articles open access. These open access publishing opportunities  allow copyright to be retained by the author(s), and a Creative Commons license is used instead of traditional publisher copyright restrictions.

These agreements can help reduce or remove the publishing cost burden on the author(s) if they choose to submit their manuscript with a publisher we have partnered with. The Libraries’ budget covers these costs on the author(s) behalf. And since the Libraries’ budget primarily comes from the student library fee, it is really UTA students who are paying for UTA scholars to publish their research in many cases. For some publishing processes, this coverage unfortunately can be invisible. If you are working with a journal published by any of the entities listed below, UTA Libraries has already invested in your publishing costs through an agreement with that publisher, either in full or in part. We are proud to do this and also support APC costs even more through the Open Initiative Grant program, described in another post in this series. Each publisher has their way of identifying eligible articles and notifying authors of an available APC waiver or open access option. Please contact us at librariesops@uta.edu for assistance or questions.

Several of our standing agreements are negotiated and handled by the UT System Digital Library (UTSDL). They look for opportunities to expand these kinds of deals as long as they meet these three goals:

1. Best content
2. Best discovery and access
3. Best business model

The ‘best content’ standard ensures that our agreements involve highly regarded peer-reviewed journals and avoid predatory practices. The ‘best discovery and access’ standard ensures that the work published via these agreements can be found and read by any user who needs it, around the world or in our own backyard. This is how we make research truly open access. The ‘best business model’ standard focuses on agreements that give UTA authors the best opportunity to succeed and, for example, do not cap the number of authors that can benefit from our agreements.

These goals apply to any of the agreements the UTSDL handles on our behalf but particularly for open access agreements. UTA Libraries has also added a couple agreements directly with the publisher. When discussing options for an agreement that includes fully covered APCs, we look for an uncapped model that does not establish a maximum threshold for articles covered per year.

These listed agreements include unlimited and full APC coverage for UTA affiliated corresponding authors.

• Association of Computing Machinery – ACM Open, 3-year pilot Read-and-Publish agreement
• Cambridge University Press – 3-year pilot Read-and-Publish agreement with University of Texas system
• Sage – Read-and-Publish agreement with University of Texas system
• SCOAP³ - Physics Letters B by Elsevier – Pilot program for one journal
• Coming soon – Institute of Physics (IOP) journals (except for Electrochemical Society) – as of this blog posting we are waiting for a fully signed agreement before it takes effect and can be utilized. Stay tuned to the UTA Libraries Open Access Agreements webpage for updates!

The following two publishers included APC discounts for affiliated UTA corresponding authors as part of our traditional agreements.  

• Elsevier Open Access Discounts - Texas Library Coalition for United Action agreement members receive a 10% discount for gold open access journals and 15% discount for hybrid open access journals
• American Chemical Society (see subscriber discounts section; UTA subscribes to the ACS All Publications Package) - $250 discount on listed prices

Another emerging model is the Subscribe to Open (S2O) or Direct to Open models where Libraries pay annual subscription fees for readership; and, if the publisher reaches a certain level of commitments or funding then they pledge to open up content on their respective platforms regardless of the authors’ institutional affiliation. These publishers also allow authors to retain copyright and use Creative Commons licenses as well. We support the following publishers for this model and continue to seek out additional opportunities that align with our research needs.

• Annual Reviews – at least 29 journals have been able to open content for 2023
• MIT Press Direct to Open Books (non-trade) – This August 3, 2023, press release confirms MIT Press have reached their 2023 goal and will open up access to 82 new books this year
• American Institute of Physics - Journal of Applied Physics, starting 2024 according to their July 6, 2023 press release.

UTA Libraries is dedicated to supporting our faculty, students, and staff in their publishing and research goals. We continually seek additional publishers to expand open access agreements, within the boundaries of our goals and ethics. Conversations about full ‘transformation’ of academic publishing take time due to cost and publisher priorities. Some publishers have engaged with open access in different ways or are not as ready to move away from the traditional type of deal. Please send us a message at librariesops@uta.edu to share with us which publisher(s) you would like to see added to the lists above. We are here as your allies and support for open access publishing and authors’ rights!

Bibliography

Borrego, Á., Anglada, L. and Abadal, E. (2021), Transformative agreements: Do they pave the way to open access?. Learned Publishing, 34: 216-232. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1347

Janicke Hinchliffe, L. (2019, April 23). Transformative Agreements: A Primer [web log]. Retrieved August 6, 2023, from https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/04/23/transformative-agreements/.   

The cover image for this blog post is "Document with Banner" by Amy Castillo, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. It is a derivative of the public domain image “Document, Agreement, Documents, Sign, Business, Paper, Pen", licensed under CC0 1.0, and was modified to add the “Open @ UTA Libraries” banner.