Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Transformative Agreements: Six Myths, Busted, Ashley Farley, Allison Langham-Putrow, Elisabeth Shook, Leila Belle Sterman, Megan Wacha

Library Faculty Publications and Presentations

Transformative agreement (TA) is an umbrella term used to describe contracts between institutions and publishers intended to transform the current, primarily subscription-based, journal publishing model to a fully open access (OA) model. The idea originated in a 2015 white paper from the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), which posited that the current level of investment ($10 billion worldwide) is sufficient to fund the transformation to OA within existing publishing structures: a system in which 60% of the market is controlled by five publishers who maintain excessive profit margins.