Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Read & Let Read: An Alternative To The Transformative Agreement, Arthur Boston

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

In March 2021, the University of California and Elsevier announced a new transformative deal which included slightly-discounted article processing fees as UC's route to open access in Elsevier journals. Librarians and researchers expressed immediate concern that this deal upheld inequities in the research system. The UC/Elsevier transformative deal, however, is just one of many that include expensive pay-to-publish structures. This commentary proposes an alternative contract between libraries and publishers that would enable wider reading and lower costs, called Read & Let Read. The three main points of a Read & Let Read deal include a half-dollar valuation of individual journal …