Libraries and research institutions are tasked with supporting research activities. In the modern academic ecosystem, this not only means providing access to high quality scholarly content (both print and digital), it also means supporting researchers in publishing new studies. Achieving both of these goals while staying with (often-shrinking) budgets, and also meeting national and institutional directives regarding the production of open access research, can be challenging.

As scholarly communications evolve in response to these pressures, publishers are coming up with new approaches to licensing and publishing content. One such approach is the transformative agreement, which moves the contractual payment away from subscription-based reading and focuses on open access publishing (under the ‘Gold’ APC model) instead.