Transformative agreement refers to a term that describes agreements negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers in which former subscription expenditures are repurposed to support open-access publishing of the negotiating institutions’ authors, thus transforming the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, gradually and definitively shifting from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers have remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services. (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges, ESAC).
In South Africa, SANLiC, a consortium for academic libraries, has negotiated transformative agreements with eight international publishers on behalf of South African university libraries and implemented the first agreements in 2021.
NWU Library and Information Services signed its first transformative agreement in 2022 with the help of SANLiC, which stipulates that any accepted article by NWU authors submitted in any of the publishers' hybrid open-access journals listed below will be published free of charge.
The agreements primarily cover all hybrid open-access journals, ensuring NWU authors do not pay Article Processing Charges (APCs). The agreements also include a few gold open-access journals, such as those from Wiley and BMC, through membership. These agreements do not cover all gold open-access journals, therefore, authors publishing in gold open-access journals not included will be responsible for APCS and will receive a discount. Since the journal lists include both hybrid and gold open-access journals, authors are advised to verify whether the selected journal is covered under the agreement.
Authors who choose to publish in gold open-access journals that fall outside the scope of the university’s existing transformative agreements will be responsible for covering the associated Article Processing Charges (APCs) from their research funding. However, they will be eligible to receive the following publisher-specific discounts:
