Data Submission Handout: Transformative Agreements - OpenAPC/openapc-de GitHub Wiki

Preliminary Remark

When collecting cost and publication data on transformative agreements (TA), OpenAPC prefers to interact directly with consortial partners or aggregators in order to process the relevant data in a uniform format for all institutions involved in the contract. As an institution, you should therefore only consider reporting TA data directly to OpenAPC in accordance with these guidelines if one of the following conditions applies:

  • The contract was concluded directly with a provider without the involvement of a consortium.
  • The consortium refuses to submit aggregated data to OpenAPC and insists on individual reports by institutions.
  • Your institution does not participate in a dedicated reporting or aggregation process that would submit the relevant data to OpenAPC.

Introduction

The TA data set stores articles published under transformative and other publishing agreements, enabling the systematic linking of publications with the corresponding contract metadata.

OpenAPC v5 (introduced in 02/2026) makes the collection and processing of this kind of data much more flexible: Until then, all OpenAPC data collection was entirely publication-based, meaning that contracts could only be represented indirectly via the items published under them. The newly introduced contract data set allows for the central collection of contract metadata and cost information at contract level. Articles from the respective contracts are linked to the corresponding contract entries via a group_id, a unique identifier that connects articles to a contract.

In addition, Gold OA articles that are part of a contract will no longer be listed in the APC data set, but in the TA data set instead. In the future, the APC data collection should only contain articles that were paid for independently with APCs and cannot be assigned to a transformative agreement. These changes significantly reduce the manual effort for institutions, improve data consistency, and enable a more flexible modeling of costs and contract information – especially for contracts with mixed payment models or different publication types.

General rules for data submission

Since transitioning to OpenAPC v5, institutions may report articles from transformative agreements and similar contracts in a uniform format, while reporting cost data at both article and contract level. For submissions, the same general rules apply as for conventional APC data reporting:

  • The data must be provided in machine-readable form, preferably as a CSV file via email or GitHub (as a pull request).
  • The data must be made publicly available and reusable under an Open Data Commons license (by submitting the data, the institution implicitly agrees to this condition).
  • Designating a contact person at the institution is recommended, but this is not necessary if the institution already participates in OpenAPC on a regular basis.

Special rules for submitting TA data

The data must comply with the updated TA schema and contain all relevant mandatory fields. The TA schema is very similar to the conventional schema for APC cost data, but has a few special features, which are explained below:

  • Field opt_out: Some contracts include an opt-out mechanism, allowing authors to exclude their publication from the contract (which usually implies that the article will remain closed access). Such articles may be reported as well and should be marked with the value TRUE in this column; all other articles should be assigned the value FALSE. The column is marked as mandatory, but it can be omitted for the sake of simplicity if your data delivery does not contain any opt-out articles or if the relevant contract does not provide for such a mechanism. In this case, OpenAPC will set the default value FALSE for all articles.

  • Field agreement: A unique name for the agreement is required here, with two general options available:

    • The preferred value is a persistent identifier, namely an ESAC ID. You should therefore search the ESAC registry to see whether the agreement is already listed there. If this is the case, the according ESAC ID (referred to as "Agreement ID" in the registry) should be used.
    • If the contract is not listed in the ESAC registry, you must assign a name yourself, which should be as unique as possible. OpenAPC recommends the following naming scheme for this purpose: "Publisher name (consortium or institution) start year-end year." Existing examples from the data set would be "Hogrefe (SUB Göttingen) 2021-2023" or "Sage (BSB) 2021-2023". This name should be kept consistent for subsequent data reports on the same contract.

Cost data

When submitting cost data, two cases must be distinguished:

  1. The costs can be directly assigned to a publication. This is the case with regular APCs or, in a more general sense, when there is a direct cost assignment to an article DOI explicitly stated on an invoice. In this case the costs should be entered directly in the euro field for the relevant article. The usual OpenAPC guidelines for dealing with discounts/VAT, etc. do apply.

  2. The costs were invoiced as a lump sum for a contract period without being explicitly assigned to specific publications. In this case the euro value for the relevant articles should be set to NA and the cost data at contract level should be reported together with the articles (as simple text in the email or in a separate table; the contract data format can be used as template). OpenAPC will create the required entries in the contract data record and, if necessary, enter the reported contract costs.

The following points are relevant in this context:

  • It is possible to mix the two principles mentioned above within a single data report, meaning that costs can be reported at both publication level and contract level at the same time.
  • Contract-level costs can be reported without submitting corresponding article data. However, it should be ensured that all mandatory contract metadata fields are submitted in this case (see above).
  • Conversely, it is also possible to report publications for a contract without submitting any cost data (neither at the publication nor at the contract level).
  • Additional costs (such as page charges or submission fees) may be submitted for all articles, even if they were not assigned regular publication level costs in the euro field. As described in the linked text, this is simply done by adding additional columns to the article table.

Reported costs at contract level are distributed evenly across all assigned publications that do not have costs at publication level (euro=NA) when being visualized in the OpenAPC treemaps. This implements the concept of EAPCs as described in the introduction, enabling comparability between publications billed at a flat rate and those paid for with traditional APCs. In the treemap, it is possible to distinguish between the two types by filtering for cost type (APC vs. equivalent APC).