Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A consortium signs a 3-year TA that obligates the publisher to convert a flagship journal to full OA by year 3.
- Is an instance
Annual TA reporting includes percentage of journal titles flipped to OA and per-article cost.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A TA renewed for a decade without any titles flipping to OA.
- Not an instance
A TA labelled 'transformative' but with no transparency obligations.
Editorial commentary
Transformative agreements (TAs) are the family of publisher contracts that shift an institution’s payment from subscription-only access toward open-access publishing, on the understanding that the arrangement is a time-limited bridge to a fully OA subscription-free journal, not a permanent hybrid model. Read-and-Publish is the most common variant; others include Publish-and-Read (the mirror structure, where the publishing fee is primary and reading access is the derived benefit) and subscribe-and-read arrangements that add an OA-publishing rider onto an existing subscription.
Plan S conditions and reporting
Plan S endorsed TAs as a transitional compliance route on explicit conditions: price transparency, a documented transition plan with milestones toward full OA, a defined end date, and public reporting through the ESAC registry. Those conditions exist precisely because a TA with no transition plan or end date is functionally indistinguishable from ordinary hybrid OA, which Plan S does not treat as compliant.
The end of dedicated Plan S funding after 2024
cOAlition S set 31 December 2024 as the end of its members’ financial support for publishing under transformative arrangements, reasoning that continued funding risked making hybrid OA a permanent fixture rather than a bridge. See cOAlition S for the governing body’s current direction (Towards Responsible Publishing) and which individual funders still support TAs under their own national strategy beyond that date — this page covers the TA mechanism itself, not the funder-consortium decision that now bounds it.
How this differs from Read-and-Publish
Transformative agreement is the genus; Read-and-Publish is one species of it, distinguished by its specific combined-fee mechanic. A TA can exist without being an R&P deal (a Publish-and-Read or subscribe-and-read structure, for instance), so the two terms are not interchangeable even though most negotiated TAs in practice take the R&P form.
References
- ESAC Initiative. cOAlition S ‘Towards Responsible Publishing’ 2023 statement. Hinchliffe LJ ‘Transformative agreements: A primer’ 2019.
Also known as
TA · Transformative deal
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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