16 October 2026
Jack Hyland, Irish Research eLibrary
CC-BY
In February 2026, OA Forward (formerly OA2020 and ESAC) announced the relaunch of the ESAC Registry, which is now known as the OA Forward Registry. Launched in 2019, the Registry is an open database of information on open access publishing agreements’ terms and condition, costs, publishing rights and workflows. It is built by and for the global community of library consortia and negotiators who engage with scholarly publishers on OA deals, allowing them to review the market, benchmark and contribute to best practice.
As the landscape of OA publishing evolves, the OA Forward community recognised the need to update and enhance its suite of resources to support negotiations. In 2025 the OA Forward team, led by Colleen Campbell, invited me, Jens Aasheim of Sikt and Nicola Bieg of TIB to act as co-chairs of the Community Resources Updates and Development Working Group. We started by drafting an action plan comprised of three packages to develop and revise the full suite of resources originally developed under the ESAC Initiative and now continuing under the stewardship of OA Forward:
- The Registry, which we chose as our first priority
- Negotiation and implementation support material (including guides, recommendations and sample agreements)
- Standardisation of agreements’ title lists of OA eligible journals
In July 2025, we surveyed the scholarly communication community to identify the Registry enhancements people most wanted. These were:
- Clarity on the Registry’s scope: what types of deals should it include? It was designed for transformative agreements, but what about deals with fully OA publishers, or deals with consortia who are moving beyond TAs?
- Better usability, searching and filtering. The Registry had basic functionality dating back to its launch in 2019, but now it holds over 1,500 agreements from more than 70 countries, with about 150 new ones being added each year
- Better visibility of when an agreement’s full contract is in the public realm, and
- It needed a detailed review of every field we were capturing for a deal. The meaning of each field wasn’t always clear, and new fields have been requested as OA agreements have evolved
The co-chairs invited members of the community to join the working group, which collaborated with the OA Forward team, hosted by Max Planck Digital Library/MaxIT. The group’s work was largely online, global, and asynchronous, using standard tools like Google Docs and Zoom to manage the project.
We agreed that what was immediately needed by the community was a refresh of the Registry. There were plenty of great ideas for a radical change of how data on OA deals and publishing is shared, but we felt that this was a much bigger, longer-term project, which is already being explored by other groups (such as the OA Forward Transparency to Steward the OA Transition Working Group), so we decided to focus on the community’s current needs.
Between October and November 2025, the group drafted detailed specs for the new Registry, based on the survey. Our challenges included:
- Keeping the Registry backwards compatible – so new deals can sit alongside the 1,500 older ones
- Keeping the Registry usable and functional for both contributors and end users. OA agreements can be very complex and we couldn’t ask contributors to log every possible permutation of their deal. The group needed to use its professional judgement and experience to anticipate what the most important data points were, and to articulate these in a way that made sense to the global community
We then passed our final plans over to Ana Valente (of the OA Forward team and Max Plank Digital Library/MaxIT), who led on its implementation and design. After a period of testing, the new Registry was announced and launched in February 2026.
One of its primary innovations with the new Registry is that it now includes a wider scope of OA publishing agreements, such as transformative agreements, publishing-only agreements, and evolving mixed-model agreements. Basically, if an agreement includes explicit commitments to publishing OA content, it is suitable for the Registry. We’re very pleased to see that since the relaunch, it now includes deals with fully OA publishers such as ACM, JMIR, MDPI and PLOS.
The new Registry of Open Publishing Agreements is an evolution in the community’s goal to making data on OA deals open by default. It isn’t designed to be a fully integrated and machine-readable record of every OA deal signed. Instead, it’s a more selective, opt-in resource with the kind of information real-world negotiators need right now to help them develop to best practice in our agreements. As before, OA Forward welcomes consortia and libraries to share their OA negotiation achievements on the Registry.