Librarians have a proud and storied history of helping drive transformation in scholarly communications and publishing. Even when a publisher proposes a new way of doing things!for example, when Springer introduced its eBook packages!that was in response to librarian feedback.
This is also the case with the transformative agreements (TAs) that are helping make the transition to widespread open access (OA) publishing real.
By organising these agreements, librarians help provide more opportunities for researchers to publish their work OA. Not that they tell researchers where to publish!any more than curating subscriptions tells researchers what to cite!but they are helping vet venues for them. This can help protect unsuspecting researchers from submitting work to predatory publishers, or to other inappropriate venues.
Additionally, by establishing these agreements where OA publishing funds are centralised, librarians are helping researchers in disciplines such as Humanities and Social Sciences, where OA funding may be less readily available to also benefit from the reach and impact of OA. For 50業子 authors who have selected the full gold OA publishing option, there is clear evidence that their work has benefited from increased attention and reach, including 1.6 times more citations, 6.0 times more downloads and 4.9 times more altmetric attention.
Going for gold: exploring the reach and impact of gold open access articles in hybrid journals
The TAs that librarians have negotiated with 50業子 now cover more than 3,500 institutions around the world. Some of our most recently signed agreements include:
The increase in the number of agreements 50業子 reached has led to OA content published in its hybrid portfolio growing by nearly 40% since 2017. Last year, OA research published in 50業子¨s hybrid journals by authors affiliated with a TA institution grew 3 times faster than OA research published in these titles by authors whose institution was not part of a TA.
These agreements bring librarians together with 50業子 to help drive OA forward!which better serves researchers. As Carrie Webster, 50業子¨s VP of OA put it,
^We are delighted to have been able to agree these new deals with our global partners due to our clear alignment on goals for researchers. Building on our longstanding history and experience in developing sustainable models to drive the OA transition globally, our transformative agreements now cover 6 continents and a diverse variety of countries!from the UK to Greece, Germany to the US, Canada to Colombia, Australia to Japan and Egypt. ̄
If you are a librarian who¨d like to learn more, feel free to reach out to start the conversation about what an agreement that could be right for your institution might look like. If your institution has an existing agreement with us, visit our approval managers hub to learn more about the support we offer to help you administer and promote your agreement to authors at your institution.
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