TCC Africa,CRKN and OA2020 Partner to Provide Peer to Peer Learning on Open Access Agreements

Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), the Canadian  Research Knowledge  Network (CRKN) and the Open Access 2020 Initiative (OA2020) have come together to host a series of peer-to-peer learning workshops on Open Access Agreements.

Recipients of this peer to peer learning will be African library consortia with the objective of knowledge sharing from similar consortia from the Global North. The peer-to-peer learning approach is essential as consortia can learn from each other and seek ways on how they can make better choices when it comes to investing in open access. So far the confirmed consortia are from Kenya, Malawi and Ghana with interests from more countries.

As higher education stakeholders are steadily adopting open access as a way to democratize research and increase visibility, transformative agreements are perceived as a key component to a comprehensive open access strategy. Open Access transformative agreements provide a practical and immediately viable framework to disinvest from the subscription paywall system while respecting the scholarly communication needs of researchers.

More about transformative agreements

“Transformative agreement” is an umbrella term describing those agreements negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers in which former subscription expenditures are repurposed to support open access publishing, thus transforming the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, gradually and definitively shifting from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services.

These agreements are a significant departure from the previous standard in subscription license agreements, as they bring the two transactional sides of subscription-based journals, reading access (subscription fees paid by libraries) and open access publishing (“hybrid” APCs predominantly paid by authors), under one centrally negotiated agreement. The dual aim of the negotiations is to bring institutional investments in scholarly journal publishing under oversight and control, with an eye to cost reduction, and to drive a transition of scholarly journal publishing to open access (Esac-initiative.org).

Resources

EIFL principles for negotiating open access agreements with publishers