Open Access: The First Transformative Agreement for Australia and New Zealand

The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) and the UK-based Microbiology Society are delighted to announce the signing of the first transformative agreement for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

[Clip]

The transformative Publish & Read (PAR) agreement is a transitional pilot for two years (2020-2021) offered on an opt-in basis. The transitional agreement provides ANZ university libraries the ability to pay a single “publish and read” fee for uncapped open access publishing in all of the Society’s journals by corresponding authors. The deal provides unlimited access to all paywalled content in the Society’s journals, including the entire archive back to 1947, for reading and text and data mining.

The opportunity for a consortial transformative agreement with the Microbiology Society arose through the Society Publishers Accelerating Open access and Plan S program (SPA-OPS). The project was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, UKRI and the ALPSP* for the development of a Transformative Agreement Toolkit for consortia to use with small society publishers. The aim is to help society publishers comply with Plan S by ensuring immediate and unrestricted access to research outputs such as journal articles.

Previously, 20 Australian and 5 New Zealand university libraries subscribed directly to various Microbiology Society journals, with subscriptions worth over £100,000 annually. 25 universities published an average of 40 articles in Microbiology Society journals in 2016-2018. Article Processing Charges (APCs) worth around £20,000 annually, were paid to publish approximately one-third of these articles open access.

The Microbiology Society publishes six journals of which two are fully open access. The PAR provides unlimited open access publishing in all six of these journals by corresponding authors at the universities that opt-in. It allows for CC-BY licence terms and there are no transactional APCs or other service charges for publishing. The Microbiology Society will notify Australian and New Zealand university authors of the PAR during the peer review process and supply a PDF of the version of record for institutional repositories.

Source Announcement

See Also: Microbiology Society Announcement