Pure read agreement

A pure read agreement is informal, symmetry-driven shorthand — coined by analogy with pure publish agreement — for a deal giving an institution or consortium reading access to a publisher’s paywalled content with no open-access publishing component attached. It is not a term defined by the ESAC Initiative or any other standards body: pure publish is genuinely established usage in the transformative-agreement literature and in ESAC’s own registry and terminology guidance, but “pure read” has no equivalent standing there. ESAC’s transformative-agreements pages and glossary do not define a category called “pure read,” and structurally could not: ESAC exists specifically to document transformative agreements — deals repurposing subscription spend toward open-access publishing — so a deal with no publishing component at all falls outside what ESAC catalogues by definition.

What the standard term actually is

What this page’s coined label describes is simply a subscription agreement (“reading agreement”/”access agreement”): a contract paying a publisher for reading access, with no bundled OA-publishing rights, no APC waiver, and nothing to report against an OA-transition target — the traditional model transformative agreements were designed to move institutions away from, not an ESAC-defined agreement type in its own right.

Where it still fits

Subscription-only deals remain common with publishers offering no transformative or OA arrangement — smaller society publishers, closed-access portfolios, legacy contracts not yet renegotiated. From a knowledge-equity view, subscription-only access concentrates reading rights among institutions that can pay and contributes nothing toward OA targets; libraries increasingly treat it as a candidate for renegotiation or cancellation, not a stable arrangement.

How it differs from a pure publish agreement

A pure publish agreement is the inverse case: a contract covering only open-access publishing, typical of fully open-access publishers with no subscription content to bundle, with no reading-access component because none is needed. A Read-and-Publish agreement sits between the two, bundling reading access with reduced or waived publishing rights as a transitional mechanism.

Correction note

An earlier version of this page cited “ESAC glossary. SPARC contract-library resources” as its source. That citation has been removed: it misattributed an informally coined term to a body that does not define it. The underlying concept — a subscription-only deal with no OA-publishing component — is real and correctly described above; only the false attribution is corrected.