Dear Colleagues,

As anticipated at the ICOLC meeting in London and the OA2020 Transformation Lab in Prague, I am very pleased to announce the re-launch of the ESAC Initiative and website (http://esac-initiative.org/) with a number of extremely valuable crowd-sourced tools and resources related to transitional license models (ie Offsetting, Read & Publish, etc.). With more and more library consortia and individual institutions now incorporating transformative agreements into their open access strategies, in alignment with the mission of the Open Access 2020 Initiative, many have expressed the urgent need for more information-sharing on the transformative mechanisms and practical aspects of these kinds of agreements.

While ESAC was originally established to develop library-driven (and not publisher-driven) standards and workflows for the growing open access publishing market, which is based on article-level charges rather than journal-level or package-level fees, ESAC has now expanded its focus to fill a vital role in the open access landscape, offering a place for institutions to share best practice, lessons learned and recommendations related to transformative agreements to increase the understanding of their scope and power to effect large-scale and lasting change in scholarly publishing. Areas of focus for ESAC now include data gathering, visualization and information sharing as a basis for negotiation strategy; license models, terms and publisher compliance; as well as open access publishing cost monitoring and control.

Some of the resources now online include:

OA Market Watch

ESAC is now aggregating data and relevant information on a number of the largest subscription publishers to help the community understand their current position in the scholarly publishing market and better assess their performance in transitioning from a subscription-based publishing model to open access.

Publisher Fact Sheets

For institutions and consortia who are just beginning to create a licensing strategy to accelerate the transition to open access and for those who are already negotiating transformative agreements, ESAC’s Publisher Fact Sheets provide a summary of the characteristics, performance and lessons learned from the agreements negotiated with some of the largest subscription publishers. The Publisher Fact Sheet relative to Springer Nature is now online!

ESAC Resources

The ESAC website has also been augmented with a section featuring resources relative to transformative agreements such as terms and workflow checklists, an online tool for sharing information and best practice, and, coming soon, recommendations from the ESAC Data Working Group on gathering and analysing different kinds of publication data in order to formulate a negotiation strategy.

By sharing the knowledge gained as we take steps to remove our financial support of the paywall system, converting our subscription budgets into funds to support open access publishing, our individual efforts will all be more successful and, collectively, more impactful. If you are negotiating transformative agreements and have data and information to share to make the ESAC tools more comprehensive and effective, please share http://esac-initiative.org/share/.

ESAC is coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library on behalf of and in collaboration with the global academic and research library community. Please explore http://esac-initiative.org and, if you have any questions, would like more information, or want to get involved, please sign up for our listserv https://listsrv.mpdl.mpg.de/mailman/listinfo/esac-offsetting-list or contact me directly.

Happy Open Access Week!

Kai Geschuhn