I contratti trasformativi: un paradosso per le biblioteche

Abstract

Transformative agreements are a very controversial model to license scientific academic publications and to foster open access. They were conceived during the 12th Berlin OA Conference entitled Staging the Open Access transformation of subscription journals to overcome the double dipping and to help publishers to fully adopt the open access model. Among the initiatives to support open access that matured after the conference cOAlitionS and PlanS are the most relevant ones. The article takes a deep look at the world of the transformative agreements in Europe thanks to the data harvested and published by the ESAC Registry and focuses on the transformative agreements licensed in Italy by CRUI. Among the achievements of this new model the author cites the substantial increase of open access articles in diverse European countries; among the challenges, the author lists the increased costs for libraries despite the need to keep the costs unchanged and the fear that, in the end, transformative agreements will not be truly transitional. As a matter of fact, transformative agreements are a big dilemma for the academic librarians’ community.