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Nineteen research universities negotiating as one, with a single position: our authors publish open in the journals they already publish in — at no cost to them, with no annual limit, and with no additional workflow.
Who this is Maurice York and Jeff Spies, Big Ten Academic Alliance. Six agreements signed, five years of data, and the instruments we used to get them — free to use, re-use, and adapt.
Figures from analysis of OpenAlex data.
Each one replaces a standard clause of the “transformative agreement” and “read-and-publish” agreements that came before — clauses that were creating unnecessary friction in the author experience and ultimately working counter to our values.
These are the whole of it. Every other clause we argue for is downstream of these three, and each one displaces a standard clause of the agreements that came before.
The corresponding author is never asked for money. Not an APC, not a discounted APC, not a departmental transfer, not a grant line. The cost conversation does not reach the author at all.
Uncapped means uncapped: every eligible article accepted during the term publishes open, however many there are. No token pool, no per-institution allocation, no first-come basis.
Identifying an institutional affiliation at acceptance is the entire workflow. No vouchers, no eligibility form, no library approval step, no waiting on a decision before the article can proceed.
The message to faculty: in all of the publications under a publisher’s umbrella, no fees, no caps, no limits, no hassle; authors keep rights in their own work under a Creative Commons license; immediately open and available to anyone. Libraries pay no more than they do now — we are converting our spend from read to publish, not adding to it.
From the vantage of 2021: only 19% of Big Ten articles were open at the time of publication. Transformative Agreements were moving the needle, gradually, alongside repositories and preprints — but they worked on the back end, on contract and payment terms, and left the author’s experience of publishing untouched. Publishing terms had become too complicated for authors, resources and opportunities were unevenly distributed, and costs had become unsustainable for authors and institutions alike.
Increase relevance to mission. Mission manifests in values — so convert our spend to align with our values and highest priorities: increasingly open and fair scholarship.
Operationalize values by anchoring them in the author experience, and align incentives to make the path to open easy.
Everything comes down to contracts in the end. Change the contracts.
There is a lineage here: subscription models, then Transformative Agreements (or ‘TAs’), now Open Publishing Agreements. Transformative Agreements did real work. They moved money from subscription toward publication, and they combined two revenue streams that had been flowing to the publisher under separate business terms — one from libraries as subscription fees, one from authors as Article Processing Charges, or APCs. They proved that a consortium could shift a publisher’s business terms. They are also where several of the problems we are now trying to fix came from.
An OPA is the step past TAs, and it differs in two ways that go together: it is values-centered, beginning from our own principles rather than from a publisher’s proposal, and it is author-focused, designed around what the author experiences rather than how the money moves on the back end.
Every standard clause of a Transformative Agreement sorts authors by something other than the quality of their work. A cap makes open publishing first-come, first-served. A fee, even a discounted one, makes it a question of who holds funds. A voucher workflow makes it a question of who knows the process. Early-career researchers, unfunded disciplines and smaller campuses lose most.
A subscription contract with a publishing component attached. The library keeps paying for access, and a defined quantity of open publishing is bundled in, usually priced as article processing charges under another name. “Transformative” describes the intent — converting subscription spend into open publishing over a fixed term — not the author’s experience of it.
The most common form of one, and the name says what it does: a read side and a publish side, negotiated together. The publish side is typically bounded — a pool of articles, an allocation per campus, a discount off the list APC — and when the boundary is reached, authors are back to paying.
It is values-centered. A Transformative Agreement begins from the publisher’s proposal — a price, a package, a quantity — and negotiating means adjusting those. We begin from our own values and principles, named and weighted before any offer exists. We share them with the publisher when negotiations open and ask them for a proposal that matches our values, rather than holding values up against a proposal after the fact. That is a different entry point, and it produces a different process: we are not working through someone else’s offer, we are asking how closely each offer aligns with a standard we set in advance. The question that got us here — we are reasonably good at measuring cost and business process, so how do we measure our values? — is the one the Dial exists to answer.
That the terms are judged by what the author experiences, not by how the money moves between library and publisher. Everything the other model leaves in place changes here. No fee reaches the author, there is no quantity to exhaust, and there is no workflow to complete — identifying an affiliation at acceptance is the whole of it. Our spend converts from reading to publishing, and the business relationship stays between publisher and consortium. It never reaches the author at all.
Because the standard clauses of a Transformative Agreement reintroduce the inequities the agreement was meant to remove. A cap makes open publishing first-come, first-served. A fee, even a discounted one, makes it a question of who holds funds. A voucher workflow makes it a question of who knows the process. Each one sorts authors by something other than the quality of their work — and early-career researchers, unfunded disciplines and smaller campuses lose most.
No. A Transformative Agreement with better terms is still built on a quantity of articles and a price per article; better terms raise the quantity or lower the price. An OPA takes both out of the design. Better terms are what you get from negotiating harder; an OPA is what you get from negotiating from somewhere else.
Both earlier forms (subscriptions and TAs) were necessary. They lifted us to where we stand today. We are able to take the next step because of them, not in spite of them. None of this is a disavowal of them — the terms set out on this page were won in negotiations that started from that ground. Our argument is that these previous forms were a stage, rather than a destination. We discuss what that values-centered entry point looks like in practice on the rest of this page.
We stopped negotiating against proposals. We begin from our own values and principles, named and weighted before any offer exists, and we hand them to the publisher when negotiations open — then ask for a proposal that matches them. The Dial is how we score what comes back.
Six values, expanded into 38 contract-able elements, each scored one to five, for 190 points possible. A zero means the offer is silent on the point — itself a finding worth recording. Score successive offers from the same publisher and you can see whether the terms are moving toward your values or away from them.
The six sit under three freedoms — to disseminate, to publish, of scholarship — and the number of scored elements under each is where our priorities turn into arithmetic.
| Freedom | Value | Elements | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freedom to disseminate70 points | Removes barriers for authors and institutions | 11 | 55 |
| Increases OA publications within our membership | 3 | 15 | |
| Freedom to publish60 points | Establishes a fair cost model | 7 | 35 |
| Increases publishing opportunities | 5 | 25 | |
| Freedom of scholarship60 points | Simplifies the publishing relationship | 4 | 20 |
| Gives authors greater control of use and reuse | 8 | 40 | |
| Total | Six values | 38 | 190 |
The weighting is the argument. Each value carries a different number of scored elements, and that count is where our priorities turn into arithmetic — removing barriers for authors is worth 55 points, simplifying the publishing relationship 20.
Drawn from OpenAlex. The bottom row is the one to take into a negotiation: in the journals an agreement covers, better than nine articles in ten now publish open.
| Indicator | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Publishing Agreements in force | 1 | 2 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| Articles published open under an OPA | 360 | 2,517 | 4,070 | 4,863 | 5,176 |
| Share published open, in OPA journals | 65.6% | 58.9% | 87.4% | 91.7% | 91.7% |
Not one of those articles carried a fee to the author, and libraries did not pay any more than they would have otherwise. That is the sentence that makes the rest of it repeatable.
Over recent years, the conversation about open access for the benefit of public knowledge has fractured into a number of models (variously described in shorthand with names such as green, gold, bronze and diamond. Whether this rubric is meant to be colors or precious materials is a matter of some debate). Our hypothesis is that the path forward for open access is an investment in all of the pathways together, rather than a bet on one.
On this continuum, commercial scholarly publishing sits at one end, academy-owned publishing at the other, with ecosystem-level models and partners standing between them at the balance point. Agreements with the large commercial publishers move the majority of article output, but only in combination with ecosystem-level partnerships and academy-owned publishing do they help to build the future that truly open knowledge will depend upon.
Big Ten Open Books is a collective action of the Big Ten libraries and Big Ten university presses: the first collection of 100 open access books published in August 2023, a second completed in summer 2025, three more planned. 150,000 downloads to date, averaging 79 per book per month.
Terms named and weighted in advance are what make a negotiation about something other than price. You are no longer adjusting someone else’s proposal; you are asking how closely it meets a standard that was already there.
Two commitments, and they only work together. Values-centered means successive rounds of offers are assessed directly by how the offer terms and contract terms improve toward matching our stated values. Author-focused means the terms are judged by what the author experiences, not by how the money moves between library and publisher. Ask what the author has to do differently: if the answer is anything at all, the terms aren’t there yet.
A rubric used across a negotiation — and across a community — is how a consortium can tell whether it is making progress or just making agreements. Ours is free to copy and change.
More than half the world’s research is now published open. What remains is where funding is thinnest, where gold OA is commercializing fastest, and where author license choice is drifting toward terms that give rights back to the publisher.
The model works, but the ground is still moving underneath all of it, and a consortium taking this route should take that into account and consider it carefully.
Our values do not change, even as the business models (out of necessity) do. It is the business models that adapt to the values, as we continually navigate toward the ideal. Our watchphrase: anchor in the author experience, and keep closing the gap between values and practice.
Publisher positions do not move for one buyer. They move when the same positions arrive from many directions at once — which is why all of this is free to use, re-use, and adapt.
The full scoring matrix as a blank template: six values, 38 scored elements, 190 points, with category subtotals and an overall score that calculate as you fill it in. Copy it and change the elements and weights to match your own priorities.
The Dial: Downloadable spreadsheet calculator
Slides from Berlin conference sessions, the OA2020 Munich workshop, and the Moving OA Forward focus session on building an open access investment portfolio.
2026: The Gap Between Values and Practice (delivered at the B18 Conference)
2025: Building an Open Access Investment Portfolio (OA Forward Special Topics Session)
2024: Institutions and Publishers as Partners (OA2020 Workshop - Munich)
2023: B16 Closing session slides
2023: Open Publishing in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (Poster delivered at the B16 Conference)
Maurice York
Vice President for Library Programs
Center for Library Programs
maurice.york@btaa.org
For help or more information
library@btaa.org