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.
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:
Interestingly, however, the current administration and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios have given no indication that they will backtrack mandates laid out by the previous administration’s Nelson Memo, which advised federal funders that grant recipients should make their funded research outputs publicly available without an embargo period (among other things). The goal of the Nelson Memo was to “…promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and accountability measures [that] will allow for greater validity of research results and more equitable access to data resources,” along with the rationale that “There should be no delay between taxpayers and the returns on their investments in research.” This memo was widely seen as a major win in the open knowledge community, and also apparently meets the approval of the current presidential administration and their appointees (more on that below).
For those unfamiliar, publishers of scholarly journals often require authors to agree to an embargo period, which means no version of their article may be made publicly available on any other platform for a certain amount of time (usually 6 to 24 months depending on the journal). This allows publishers to profit from subscription-only access to new research during its period of highest readership. After the embargo period, publishers have generally allowed authors to make available the “author’s accepted version” of the article (the version after peer review but before publisher copyediting and typesetting) in a funder’s repository, institutional repository, or disciplinary repository. The practice of sharing items openly in this way is often referred to as “self-archiving” or “green open access.” It is also very common for journals to offer a pay-for-open model, through which authors can pay an article processing charge (APC) to apply a Creative Commons license to their article instead of transferring all rights to the publisher. This is often referred to as “gold open access.” Federal funders have typically allowed authors to use grant funds for APCs.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) has long required grant recipients to deposit copies of grant-funded articles in their openly accessible PubMed Central repository, but until this year, the NIH allowed publishers to retain sole distribution rights for a 12-month embargo period if authors chose not to pay for open access. In turn, many publishers have offered authors the service of depositing the appropriate article version in PubMed Central on their behalf after the embargo period ends.
Showdown
Last year, in compliance with the Nelson Memo, the NIH announced an updated Public Access Policy, originally slated to take effect on December 31, 2025. On April 30, newly appointed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya announced a 6-month acceleration of the policy’s effective date, to begin on July 1. The new policy “…requires Author Accepted Manuscripts accepted for publication in a journal, on or after July 1, 2025, to be submitted to PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication, for public availability without embargo upon the Official Date of Publication.” Unsurprisingly, it seems several of the largest publishers are not happy about this new public access policy.
As an early career librarian trying to parse this complicated, evolving situation, I’ve relied heavily on my professional communities. Conversations on the University Information & Policy Officers listserv have been really helpful for my understanding. Jeremy York, Assistant Director of the Copyright Office at University of Michigan Library, kindly granted me permission to quote his summary of publisher reactions.
“Publishers are responding to the new policy in different ways. Some publishers, like Wiley and Springer Nature will no longer deposit works in PubMed Central on behalf of authors unless authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make the work available under an open license. They also are not allowing deposit by the author of the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central and see the pursuit of this ‘green open access’ route by authors as a violation of their publishing agreement.
The American Chemical Society (ACS), on the other hand, has implemented an Author Development Charge (ADC). If authors do not pay the APC to have their work published with an open license, they can still pay the ADC to be able to deposit the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in PubMed Central to comply with NIH’s policy.[1] If authors deposit the AAM in PubMed Central without paying the ADC, ACS sees this as a violation of the publishing agreement.”
The complicating factor here is that the NIH’s claims over funded research outputs predate any author’s agreement with a publisher. The NIH is simply exercising a right that all federal funders have held for a long time, called the Federal Purpose License. In the NIH’s case, their version of federal purpose license states grant recipients “…may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was acquired, under a Federal award. The HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] awarding agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes, and to authorize others to do so.”
In response, certain publishers are advising authors that the only way to comply with both a) the NIH public access policy and b) their journals’ copyright agreements is to pay some sort of fee. They are signaling an unwillingness to publish paywalled articles that will be made publicly accessible on another platform; if a preexisting claim to an article exists, then publishers may simply choose not to publish that article despite acceptance by an editorial board, unless the author pays a fee.
Yet, the purpose behind federal funders’ public access policies is not to force authors to pay for open access, as evidenced by the NIH’s announcement on July 8, which revealed plans to cap the amount of NIH-funded dollars that authors can spend to make articles open access (or in other words, cap the amount authors can spend on APCs) beginning in 2026.[2] Clearly, the NIH does not want to pay exorbitantly for articles it already holds rights over via the federal purpose license.
Breakdown
This is an important historical inflection point in the funder/author/publisher triangular relationship, in part because the NIH awarded over $26 billion across 41,304 research project grants in 2024, up from $22 billion in 2019 (although those numbers may deteriorate going forward given the current presidential administration’s proposed budget). Needless to say, federal funding is integral to the United States’ research infrastructure, meaning federal funders possess a lot of leverage to shift that infrastructure. What happens over the coming months as other federal funders’ public access policies take effect may significantly alter available open access publishing pathways for scholarly authors and influence subscription negotiations for libraries.
For interpretations of what this ongoing situation means for authors and advice about how to navigate the publication process as a grant recipient, I recommend Authors Alliance, who put together this excellent FAQ page [and update here] on the current “contradictory policy environment,” and are co-hosting a webcast on August 5, 2025 focused on new federal funder sharing requirements.
For academic libraries, one likely outcome in the immediate future is increased traffic on existing read-and-publish deals and increased pressure to engage in new and/or bigger read-and-publish deals from research faculty.[3] However, many academic libraries receive some portion of indirect costs paid by federal funders to universities for grant oversight, so any budget squeeze due to the White House’s proposed cap on indirect costs would make it difficult for those libraries to invest in new or more expensive read-and-publish deals.
On the other hand, if both publishers and federal funders were to hold firm in their current standoff, public access policies and publication fee caps could gradually redirect authors away from pay-for-open publishing models and toward outlets that allow for self-archiving or use a free-to-read, free-to-publish model (sometimes referred to as “diamond open access”). Big for-profit publishers are relying on their journals’ prestige and importance in tenure portfolios to withstand these shifting sands, but if the cost of publishing in their journals remains unaffordable for authors, readership and tenure committees could begin to elevate free or affordable open access journals in their place. Many such alternative outlets exist; for journals with zero-embargo deposits, you can check JISC open policy finder, and diamond open access journals are easily found on the Directory of Open Access Journals by selecting the “without fees” filter. It is worth noting that, among the big publishers, Sage stands apart by providing a relatively generous zero-embargo self-archiving policy.
A world in which libraries regain some financial relief from big publishers, and in which more people can benefit from openly accessible research findings, is one we should hope for. The actual outcome of this standoff is impossible to predict but is certainly worth monitoring for academic librarians.
[1] Several smart folks, including Authors Alliance, have doubts about whether authors will be allowed to use NIH grant funding to pay for an ADC. From Jeremy York’s summary: “The NIH guidance states that ‘Costs for publishing services that are charged differentially because an Author Accepted Manuscript is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy or the work is the result of NIH funding are unallowable because charges must be levied impartially on all items published by the journal, whether or not under a federal award’ (GPS 7.9.1).”
[2] The announcement did not indicate an effective date or exact cap amount.
[3] For those unfamiliar, read-and-publish deals (sometimes referred to as “transformative agreements”) between libraries and publishers provide a mechanism for an institutions’ authors to publish through an open access pathway without themselves paying APCs. Instead, the institution can draw from a pool of funds or credits to cover the APC on behalf of the author. This open access mechanism is part of the library’s subscription to the publisher’s journal portfolio. Aside from libraries shouldering massive subscription costs, the main drawback of read-and-publish deals are that libraries are often subscribing to journal access as opposed to purchasing perpetual access for that year’s journal issues. This move toward conditional access and away from ownership creates an increasingly difficult situation for libraries to extract themselves from, lest they lose access to journal backlogs from the years they subscribed instead of purchased.
