Transformative "Read and Publish" Agreements: What is a Transformative Agreement?

A transformative agreement, also called a "Read and Publish" agreement, refers to an agreement negotiated between an institution (library, national and regional consortium) and a publisher in which former subscription expenditures are repurposed to support open access publishing of the negotiating institutions’ authors. Such agreements shift the purely subscription-based model (whereby libraries pay for access to journal content that is behind a paywall) to a model where some of the (former subscription) expenditures are repurposed to cover the article processing charges (APCs) required to publish articles open access (historically born by the article author). For Hofstra University researchers, this means that in addition to having access to a publisher's journal content, they may also have the option of publishing an article in one of the journals Open Access without having to pay an APC.