New transformative agreements to promote open-access publications

Transformative agreements are contracts between library consortiums and publishers to transform the current subscriptions at no cost to open-access publications, maintaining the access to reading. Over the last months, these agreements for the Spanish universities have been carried out at CRUE and CSIC for four main scientific publishers: Elsevier, Springer, Nature, Wiley and the American Chemical Society. Also, the UB, through the Learning and Research Resource Centre ( CRAI ), signed a transformative agreement with Cambridge University Press. The agreements include more than 5,500 scientific journals. "The main publishing houses where the UB researchers publish are Elsevier , Springer and Wiley. With data from the Web of Science, the UB-correspondence articles in these three publishers account for a third of the total production of the UB", notes Ignasi Labastida, rector's delegate for open science and head of the Research Unit at CRAI. "For the UB, these agreements mean the opening of 550 articles the first year that will be progressively increased during the years of validity of the agreement.