Change of scenery in journal negotiations: transformative agreements

Abstract

For many years the scientific community and research libraries have been denouncing the unfair distribution of the academic publishing business: the institution pays for the research, the researcher publishes in a journal, for which he/she is also a free peer reviewer, and the library has to pay again by subscription so that its community can read it. Knowledge is locked behind a paywall. If the author wants his article to be published openly to be read without this lock, he has to pay again, this time the APC (article proccesing charge). One way or another, institutions or authors continue to put more money into the scientific publishing market, which is dominated by 20 world-class publishers, accounting for half of the articles published and indexed annually in Web of Science.