Collection Spotlight: Transformative Agreements at SU
By Dylan Mohr, Open Scholarship Librarian
Each year, scholars publishing articles in academic journals are increasingly being asked to pay article processing charges (APCs). The payment of these fees can sometimes be required before the article can be published and often range from $2,000-$10,000. What resources are available to you at Syracuse University that cover or help with these costs?
The Syracuse University Libraries (SUL) have negotiated what are called transformative agreements with several publishers to cover the APC costs for SU-affiliated authors. At the most basic level, these agreements restructure the model of academic journal publishing away from one based on subscription revenue toward one based on open access publishing where publishers are paid through APCs from contributing authors (or their institutions). Put differently, libraries are no longer paying for access to journals, but they are paying the APCs for their faculty to publish in those journals. Leaving the pros and cons of this model aside, here is a list of the current transformative agreements that the Libraries have in place:
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Cambridge University Press
- Company of Biologists
- Institute of Physics (IOP)
- PLOS
- Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
- The Royal Society
- Wiley
This means that if you are an SU-affiliated author, you can make your work immediately open access (both through your publisher and via institutional repositories like SURFACE) and have the associated costs covered by these transformative agreements. More information on these agreements can be found on the guide to Transformative Agreements and APC Coverage or by emailing the Open Scholarship Librarian, Dylan Mohr. To provide feedback or suggest agreements for the Libraries to explore in the future, please complete the Resource Feedback Form.