5 January 2022
Whether assessing a “read and publish” offer for the first time or developing a comprehensive strategy to navigate the open access transition, adapting to the changes underway in scholarly publishing is a challenge that librarians everywhere are facing. With open access publishing far outpacing growth in the underlying scholarly journal market, there is increasing awareness that libraries cannot afford not to have a transition plan.
The ESAC Initiative brings information professionals together to share knowledge and build expertise to navigate the open access transition in libraries via mentorship, dedicated working groups and other activities focusing on author and library workflows, data gathering and analytics, agreement terms, stakeholder engagement and more. In early 2021, ESAC produced the Uncover the publishing profile of your institution guide, as well as the updated ESAC Market Watch. Now, digging deep into the operational aspects of negotiating and implementing transformative agreements and central open access publishing agreements with scholarly publishers, ESAC has released three new incredibly rich and authoritative community resources:
The ESAC Reference Guide to Transformative Agreements
Threading together and contextualizing the many local recommendations, toolkits and data openly available, the reference guide serves as an authoritative and essential orientation on preparing, negotiating and implementing transformative agreements for librarians and consortium staff just starting out or looking to update their strategies based on the latest benchmarks.
This spectrum illustrates the array of transformation drivers that characterize transformative agreements (TAs), to help institutions evaluate publisher proposals during the negotiation process, assess the progress of their current TAs, and define their next negotiation objectives, mapping out how successive transformative agreement iterations depart from the limitations of the subscription paradigm and progress to a system based on open access.
2021 Enhancement to the ESAC Workflow Recommendations
Based on the critical insights and experience accumulated in the most recent wave of transformative agreements, the 2021 Enhancement to the ESAC Workflow Recommendations (2017) comprises an updated perspective on the responsibilities of the contractual partners and the metadata necessary to optimize workflows around open access publishing.
Members of ESAC will share a few insights that informed the creation of these resources in a dedicated webinar on Wednesday 19th January 2022 in two time slots to enable global participation. Bring your questions and case scenarios, as plenty of time in the one-hour session will be given to moderated discussion and Q&A. All are welcome! Register here (congenial for Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania time zones) or here (congenial for The Americas, Europe, Africa time zones).
If you would like to be matched with a mentor or would be interested in participating in any of ESAC’s working groups and activities, contact ESAC with your area of interest.