Abstract
Transformative Agreements (TA) are bringing about significant changes in the roles of academic librarians. These agreements, which are often managed by Acquisitions and Assessment professionals, now focus on payment for publishing rather than payment for reading. As costs shift from traditional subscriptions to fees that include both reading and publishing costs, it becomes necessary for librarians to develop mechanisms and best practices for collecting and evaluating various data points and metrics. These metrics include publishing patterns, cost inflation, usage statistics, funding support, and other relevant data. The insights gained from these analyses are essential for negotiating contracts and tracking the ongoing implementation of new agreement models. The University of Miami Libraries has entered into several TAs with different scholarly publishers. The primary objective of these agreements is to encourage Open Access (OA) publishing and to reduce the cost to UM authors for publishing OA. In parallel, UM Libraries has also ensured that these agreements are aligned with our institution's priorities for research and publishing and that these agreement models are cost-transparent and attained at a sustainable price. In this paper, we present the review, data collection, and analyses conducted by our team to evaluate TA opportunities offered by publishers either directly or through consortia. We discuss the insights from the analyses, the importance of institutional research and publishing interests, and the weight of each in decision-making when pursuing TA offers.