A transformative agreement, or read-and-publish deal, merges two payments universities used to make separately: the subscription that lets a campus read a publisher's journals, and the article processing charges that let its authors publish open access in them. In 2018, when the University of California canceled its Elsevier contract, the sticking point was exactly this bundling; in 2021, California and Elsevier signed a four-year agreement doing precisely it. By 2025, the registry maintained by the open-access organization ESAC counted well over 500 such agreements worldwide, concentrated in Europe under cOAlition S pressure and spreading through North America.
This is an explainer on how the deals work; institutions negotiating them need legal and financial review of the actual contract.
How does a read-and-publish deal work?
The university pays one annual fee, often tens of millions of dollars for a large system, covering both reading access and a set number or unlimited quota of open-access publications for corresponding authors. Researchers stop paying individual APCs out of grants for covered journals. Publishers like the model because revenue stays stable during the open-access transition; libraries like it because capex becomes predictable and transparent, and usage data become auditable. The contracts usually cap the open-access share, ratchet it upward annually, and specify a target end state in which the whole portfolio is open access.
Why did Europe push first?
cOAlition S, the funder consortium behind Plan S, required from 2021 that research it funds be immediately open access, and named transformative agreements as the sanctioned bridge. The Netherlands' VSNU (now UNL) pioneered the negotiating style in the mid-2010s with Springer, and Germany's DEAL consortium negotiated national deals with Wiley in 2019 and Springer Nature in 2020 — the latter covering more than 13,000 articles a year across some 1,000 institutions. Nordic countries followed with joint national licensing. The effect was leverage: national consortia negotiating for an entire country command terms an individual campus cannot.
Do they actually save money?
Evidence is mixed and contested. Analyses by SPARC and by university libraries typically show total costs staying flat or rising slightly at first, with the hope resting on the ratchet: as open-access quotas grow, subscription components should shrink, ending in a pure open-access contract. Critics, including some open-access researchers who model publisher revenue, argue the deals institutionalize high APC levels and lock publishers into continued large profits — the contracts guarantee what subscriptions alone no longer could. A 2023 analysis of European agreements found corresponding-author publication shares skewed toward well-funded, senior authors, raising equity questions about whose work gets the open-access slots.
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What is the United States doing?
Later and more fragmented. The University of California's 2021 Elsevier deal was the marquee example; MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of North Carolina signed comparable deals with Cambridge, Wiley, and Elsevier through 2022-2024. The absence of a national negotiating body, unlike DEAL in Germany, means terms vary campus by campus, which weakens leverage.
What do the contracts actually specify?
Beyond headline fees, the operative clauses are where these deals live or die. Most agreements spell out the number of open-access publications covered per year, what happens when authors exceed the cap, whether uncapped publishing costs extra, which journals are included, and crucially, the ratchet: a schedule that shifts the payment mix from reading to publishing over the contract term. The best contracts include exit clauses triggered if a publisher fails to meet open-access milestones, and data clauses requiring publishers to report publication volumes and costs in auditable form. Negotiators who have written about the process emphasize that the caps matter more than the discounts a publicity release celebrates, because a capped quota that runs out mid-year pushes researchers back into paying APCs individually, recreating the old inequity inside the new deal.
What happens when negotiations collapse?
The failed deals teach as much as the signed ones. When the University of California walked away from Elsevier in 2019, the system's libraries kept access through interlibrary loan and open repositories while researchers organized; the two sides settled only once the university demonstrated it could sustain a no-deal state. Germany's DEAL consortium, by contrast, let its contract with Elsevier lapse in 2018 and spent years without one, an experiment that other consortia studied closely. The pattern across collapses is consistent: access degrades unevenly, with well-funded departments absorbing the loss and junior researchers feeling it most, and publishers typically return to the table when a large consortium shows it will not fold. Negotiation leverage, not principle, moves these contracts.
What would make the model succeed or fail?
The stated endpoint is a fully open-access portfolio at no higher total cost. If the ratchets fail and fees plateau, transformative agreements will have converted a subscription system into a subscription system with better reading access and worse cost optics. The measurable test: library total spend per article published, tracked over a full contract cycle — data that both sides now have, because the contracts demand it.
