Towards Open Access with transformative agreements

1.3.2021

FinELib consortium promotes open access publishing by concluding so-called transformative agreements with scientific publishers.

FinELib has negotiated transformative agreements for the following resources:

  • American Chemical Society (ACS)
  • Elsevier SD Freedom
  • Emerald Premier
  • IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)
  • Oxford Journals
  • RSC Read & Publish (Royal Society of Chemistry)
  • SAGE Premier
  • SCOAP3
  • Springer Compact
  • Taylor & Francis Library
  • Wiley Online Library

Transformative agreements are agreements between organizations or consortia and publishers. Their purpose is to:

  • switch from a business model based on subscription fees to a business model based on open access publishing services

  • move subscription fees to cover costs of open access publishing

  • function as transitional agreements when moving from subscription based agreements to open access publishing agreements

  • make the terms and conditions of agreements public

  • control the growth of total costs

  • make open access publishing possible for researchers with CC BY license which allows extensive reuse

  • enable a publication process which serves the needs of researchers and research organizations.

Open access publishing of research publications is directed by the policy of cOAlition S funders, Plan S Principles, and the policy of Finland's research community, Declaration for Open Science and Research. The latter commits the key Finnish research organizations to promoting openness of European science.

Open access publishing of research publications is directed by the policy of cOAlition S funders, Plan S Principles, and the policy of Finland's research community, Declaration for Open Science and Research. The latter commits the key Finnish research organizations to promoting openness of European science.

The cOAlition S funders (among others, Academy of Finland) require in Plan S that researchers make their scientific publications openly available to everybody.

One way, to fill the requirements of Plan S is to publish in a journal included in a transformative agreement. When defining the contents of agreements of this kind, cOAlition S refers to the ESAC’s (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges) description of transformative agreements.

Transformative agreements may contain individual journals, which do not meet the requirements of Plan S, for example, because the journal does not offer the CC BY license.

cOAlition S has published Journal Checker Tool to help researchers evaluate which publication channels fulfil the requirements of Plan S.

More information on agreements at FinELib’s agreements page.