LAC Session Type
Paper
Name
"Transform to Open": Analysis & Insight for Transformative Agreements at the University of Miami
Description

Transformative Agreements (TA) are bringing about significant changes in the roles of academic librarians. These agreements, which are often managed by acquisitions and assessment professionals, focus on payment for publishing rather than payment for reading. As costs shift from traditional subscriptions to fees that include both reading and publishing costs, there is a need for librarians to develop mechanisms and best practices for collecting and evaluating various data points and metrics. These metrics include publishing patterns, cost inflation, usage statistics, funding support, and other relevant data. The insights gained from these analyses are essential for negotiating contracts and tracking the ongoing implementation of new agreement models. The University of Miami (UM) Libraries has entered into several TAs with different scholarly publishers. The primary objective of these agreements is to encourage open-access publishing and to reduce the cost to UM authors for publishing open-access. In parallel, UM Libraries has also ensured that these agreements are aligned with our institution's publishing interests and priorities and that these agreement models are cost-transparent and attained at a sustainable price. In this paper, we present the review, data collection, and analyses conducted by our team to evaluate TA opportunities offered by publishers either directly or through consortia. We aim to discuss the insights from the analyses, the importance of institutional publishing interests, and the weight of each in decision-making when pursuing TA offers. Based on our experience at UM Libraries, this paper aims to achieve two key goals: 1. Demonstrate the value of data-driven practices to evaluate TA offers. These practices include consistent data collection, establishment of key metrics for evaluation, and standardized analysis processes. 2. Demonstrate the significance of institutional publishing interests and their importance in decision-making when pursuing TA offers.

Keywords
Transformative Agreements; Read and publish; Open Access; Article Processing Charges (APC); Publishing patterns; Data-driven practices; Contract negotiation