The Read & Publish Dilemma

Is this a losing proposition?

A claw machine wishing the player good luck.

Read & Publish (R&P) agreements (referred to by many names, but most commonly “transformative agreements”) are package subscription deals offered to academic libraries by publishers, sometimes by way of library consortium negotiation. What distinguishes an R&P agreement from the classic “big deal” is the allure of open access (OA) publishing support: as part of the agreement, an institution’s affiliated authors can receive coverage for article processing charges (APCs) required to publish OA in a portfolio of the publisher’s academic journals. This can look a few ways: a limited pool of APC-dedicated funds that replenishes annually; or a limited pool of credits or tokens; or rarely, an uncapped automatic waiver for all accepted articles; and these funds or credits might be limited to hybrid OA journals (journals that allow authors to either publish their articles behind a subscription paywall without direct cost, or publish OA for a fee) or gold OA journals (journals that require all articles be published OA for a fee).

The premise of R&P agreements was first proposed by faculty at the Max Planck Digital Library in 2015. It quickly captured the imagination of many influential OA advocates as a potential path toward mass conversion of the academic publishing system away from the traditional subscription model to a fully OA future, and R&P agreements have since proliferated across Europe and the U.S. After reflecting on how events have unfolded over the past decade, many of those same proponents (e.g. cOAlitionS, Jisc) are no longer confident in the promise of R&P agreements. 

The question of R&P agreements asks whether the ends justify the means. On one hand, R&P agreements and the APC model upon which they are based have significantly increased the overall market share of OA publications over the past 10 years, now up to around 50% of all journal articles published annually (although that trajectory has plateaued over the past several years). R&P agreements also provide a neat solution for federally funded authors who are worried about potential caps on the amount of grant dollars they can spend on APCs.

On the other hand, many smart folks have pointed out that, under the hood, R&P agreements with large publishers are still the same big deals with the same big deal problems. R&P agreements help sustain the APC model, which has essentially moved the cost barrier from readers to authors, naturally excluding authors from underfunded disciplines, from institutions without R&P agreements, and largely from the Global South. The APC model also incentivizes journals to publish more articles and generate more revenue, which causes additional stress on the peer review system and contributes to higher retraction rates. Hybrid OA journals provide publishers a “double dip” revenue stream by charging libraries for subscription access while also reaping APCs, without reducing journal subscription costs when articles are published OA. Publishers don’t seem keen to speed up the rate of transition from hybrid to gold (it would take 70 years to reach fully gold OA at the 2018-2022 journal flipping rate, per Jisc). And why would publicly traded publishers change anything about their behavior when they’re enjoying tidy returns (to the tune of a 38% profit margin worth $1.5 billion annually, for instance)?

Of course, not all publishers behave in the same way, and not all R&P agreements are created equally. Dér recently raised the point that, to be truly “transitional/transformative,” the Max Planck team always envisioned that R&P agreements would evolve through regular negotiations, and eventually, libraries would “…unbundle fixed lump-sum OA payments or capped OA article allowances and adopt a post-payment model. This way, investments can be linked, objectively, to the actual number of articles published…” Although university presses and society publishers seem more willing to explore alternative R&P conceptions, this goal has ostensibly been lost in the shuffle during negotiations with big publishers. 

Ultimately, in their current common form, big R&P agreements ask research institutions to further sacrifice control of the scholarly communication system to for-profit publishers by incentivizing submissions to their journals. This relationship undercuts efforts to promote author and/or institutional engagement with other OA publishing and distribution models (e.g. diamond OA, pre-prints, self-archiving). When factoring in the bloated subscription packages attached to these distorted OA perks, it seems increasingly difficult for the ends to justify the means.

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For those interested, here is some more leisure reading in addition to the links scattered above: