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.
NWU authors are eligible to publish open access with the publishers below: