Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A national consortium signs a 3-year R&P deal with a major publisher giving CC BY OA to all corresponding-author articles.
- Is an instance
An institution publishes its R&P cost-and-volume data annually.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Paying APCs separately on top of an R&P deal because of complex eligibility rules.
- Not an instance
An R&P deal with no published cost transparency or article cap reporting.
Editorial commentary
Read-and-Publish (R&P) is one form of transformative agreement. Under R&P, the institution pays a single combined fee covering both subscription access to all (or most) of the publisher’s journals and unlimited (or capped) open-access publication by its authors. R&P agreements are typically multi-year, negotiated by national consortia (e.g., Jisc in the UK, Couperin in France, Bibsam in Sweden), and intended to shift publisher revenue gradually from subscriptions to OA publication.
How the fee mechanics work
A typical R&P deal is priced against the institution’s prior subscription (“big deal”) spend plus an estimate of its authors’ expected publishing volume in the publisher’s journals, with the combined figure negotiated down over the contract term as the OA-publishing share grows. Eligibility for the free-publishing component is usually restricted to the corresponding author being affiliated with a participating institution, and agreements may be uncapped (any eligible article published OA) or capped at a set article volume per year, with overflow either declined, delayed to the next contract year, or charged separately.
Tracking compliance: the ESAC registry
The ESAC Initiative maintains a public registry of transformative and R&P agreements, recording publisher, consortium, contract term, and — where the negotiating parties disclose it — price and article-volume terms. Because R&P deals are accepted as Plan S-compliant when they meet transformative-arrangement criteria, the registry functions as the reference point institutions and funders use to check whether a given publisher-consortium deal actually qualifies.
Criticisms
Critics note two recurring problems: R&P deals are usually negotiated on top of a publisher’s existing subscription market share, which can entrench incumbent publishers rather than open competition to new OA-native entrants; and pricing transparency is uneven — many deals disclose the negotiated total but not the per-article cost breakdown, making cross-institution or cross-publisher comparison difficult.
References
- ESAC Initiative (esac-initiative.org) registry of transformative agreements. Jisc R&P framework.
Also known as
R&P agreement · Read & Publish deal
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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