While publishing scholarly work has never been a simple undertaking for academic authors, the growing popularity of open access publishing has broadened the potential reach of published research while introducing new complexities—and costs—to the publication process.
Over the years, UBC Library’s commitment to open access has made it possible for our librarians to offer support to UBC authors interested in publishing with open access publishers and organizers, both nationally and internationally. This support has taken many forms, both financial and consultative, through UBC Library’s Open Publishing Program services, funding programs such as the UBC Open Access Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences Research, institutional memberships in open access organizations and publisher discounts through negotiated license agreements with selected publishers. The library’s membership in the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), which represents more than 80 institutions across Canada in “large-scale licensing and content acquisition activities,” has also opened new pathways to open access with the advent of transformative agreements.
“Traditionally, when the library buys [subscription] packages from publishers, what we’re doing is paying for the ability [for library users] to read the content. Transformative agreements are flipping that notion,” says Erin Fields, Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian at UBC Library Digital Initiatives.
With transformative agreements, Fields says, the library is essentially footing the cost so that library users can not only read the content, but that UBC researchers who want to publish their articles as open access can do so without incurring extra fees. Those fees, known as Article Processing Charges or Author Processing Charges (APCs), are typically charged to authors by the publisher to cover the cost of making their article publicly available through open access, and to recoup some of the lost revenue that would normally be gained from paid subscriptions. The charges range widely, with an average cost of just over $900 USD , but with some journals tipping the scales at $2000 to $4000 USD per article.
It’s very restrictive, notes Fields, especially for those authors who did not figure that additional cost into their grants and may not have the additional funding available to pay to make their research open access. This puts up a steep barrier to open access, which disproportionally effects fields of study, like the humanities and social sciences, where grant amounts tend to be smaller overall compared to science, technology and medical fields.
“This is eliminating that barrier. Instead, the library is paying a subscription fee that allows people to read and publish at no cost and with open access,” says Fields.
At UBC, this move to transformative agreements is a joint venture, co-funded by UBC Okanagan (UBCO) Library. “Whatever transformative agreements we enter into, it benefits both campuses. It’s not going to only be Okanagan or only Vancouver,” says Arielle Lomness, Collections Librarian at UBCO Library.
Those agreements are also not limited to journal publishing, but encompass the far costlier realm of open access ebook publishing. Publishing an open access book through a major publisher also comes at a steeper cost than journal article publishing, with Book Processing Charges (BPCs) ranging from $1,500 USD for individual chapters up to $20k USD for full monographs and edited collections.
“We have done a few different ebook packages, so while [transformative agreements] are very common on the journal side, it’s becoming more common to see these same sorts of agreements on the ebook side as well,” says Lomness.
UBC Library entered into its first transformative agreement in January 2021 through CRKN, which negotiated a three-year agreement with SAGE Publishing on behalf of its member organizations. In January 2022, CRKN announced a transformative agreement with Cambridge University Press (CUP), which as a cost neutral “read and publish” agreement, makes it possible for affiliated authors to publish at no charge in almost 400 journals, where previously those authors would be on the hook for an APC of £1,700 ($2,633 CDN) in order to publish an article open access.
“There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into this,” says Lomness, in talking about the negotiations that make agreements like this one possible. “And there’s always the chance that things revert back. We’ve seen that if certain models can’t reach certain funding thresholds, then [the agreements] don’t continue. So we want authors to use these [discounts] as much as they can.”
Find out more about all the open access publisher discounts available to authors at UBC.