Transformative agreements are now the key to open access

When the Dutch UKB coalition of research libraries signed up to the very first of what are now known as transformative agreements (TAs) with us in 2015, it was taking an admirable leap of faith with what was then an entirely novel concept.

And it is safe to say that TAs, which bundle the cost of open access (OA) publishing with subscription deals, took some time to gain traction. Even in 2018, articles published via a TA accounted for just 3 per cent of all gold OA articles. That is why we called for and ultimately identified a second route to compliance for authors whose funders had OA mandates.

Transformative journals (TJs) – journals committed to transitioning to full open access – were aimed in particular at authors whose funders required OA publication but were not willing to support publication in hybrid titles and whose country or institution was not part of a TA. We supported TJs on a scale not mirrored by all the other publishers put together, committing our entire portfolio to OA transition so that authors could still publish in their journal of choice.

Two years on, Springer Nature titles account for more than half of all TJs that reached their targets for full transition, as set by Plan S. Journals in the early days of transition, such as the Nature titles, are making significant progress, and in 2024, 23 Springer Nature titles – only some of which met their TJ targets – will go fully OA. We believe it is responsible to flip journals only when we are confident that they can be sustained and successful; anything else would be setting them, their editors, their authors and the communities they serve up for failure.

Fundamentally, though, TJs are not proving to be the driver to OA that we were hoping they would be. They are hamstrung by funder mandates, which are often inadequate to support them, and not enough funders have come on board. Over the past two years, the number of Plan S funders supporting TJs increased by just four, meaning there are still more than 100 that don’t.

During the same period, Springer Nature signed 15 new transformative agreements and renewed five more, increasing the number of institutions covered by a TA by 22 per cent. Indeed, by 2022, articles published open access via a TA accounted for a full 20 per cent of all gold OA articles.

TAs are clearly where our focus should be. We published three times more OA articles in our Springer hybrid titles last year via TAs than via author choice. Moreover, in countries where we have a TA, up to 90 per cent of articles we publish are now published OA. In Germany, OA articles have grown by a factor of almost nine as a result of our TA with Projekt DEAL.

Another advantage is that TAs can be adapted and applied in a number of ways to suit circumstances. No longer the preserve of the northern European market, they have been signed in the US, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, Egypt, Portugal, Greece, Japan and Australia.

But perhaps most importantly, we are increasingly seeing the benefits that TAs deliver for the whole community.

For librarians, they provide easy workflow and reporting because they avoid the need to administer multiple individual payments for article processing charges (APCs). And they offer complete access to publishers’ paywalled holdings – which was not always the case even in previous subscription-only “big deals”.

For the broader research enterprise, TAs reuse existing money, drive OA growth and support a more equitable transition benefiting all academic disciplines, while for funders, the increased usage of OA articles delivers greater reach of the research they have funded, often with little extra cost.

But perhaps most importantly, TAs deliver for authors. In the main, no payment is required from them and because the APC is paid centrally it makes choosing to publish OA an easy option. They allow authors to publish OA in a wide range of journals, and because TAs make the final published version of record immediately available, authors benefit from the increase in citations, visibility and usage that comes from publishing gold OA. In the US, for instance, our 2021 agreement with California Digital Library has seen global downloads increase by 180 per cent in a single year.

Our goal is to have an OA transition mechanism that is both sustainable and equitable. So we have to work out how we can continue to adapt TAs to better meet the needs of a wider range of institutions, including in the Global South. With library budgets alone not being enough to support the transition, discussions need to continue with funders and institutions to ensure that supplementary funding is available.

Continued growth in transformative agreements will enable us to reach our initial target of half of all our research content being published open access by the end of next year – and enable the kind of rapid discovery that helped mitigate the effects of the pandemic and that we need to address the big challenges we still face.

Steven Inchcoombe is president, research at Springer Nature.