Open access "read-and-publish" agreements, also called "transformative agreements," allow authors affiliated with subscribing institutions to publish articles open access without paying an article processing charge (APC). Journal articles published open access are freely available, however articles not published OA are still behind a paywall. The library's fees fund access to both subscriber-only content as well as APCs for affiliated authors.

The argument for read and publish agreements is that this model allows publishers to transition away from a pricing model that relies on subscription revenue and toward a model that is fully open access, funded by APCs. The arguments against read and publish agreements are many. Most publishers that offer these agreements are not transparent about their costs and offer no firm date when they will make the transition to fully open access publishing. It is possible that read and publish agreements, because they enable publishers to collect both subscription fees and APCs, actually disincentivize a transition to full open access. In addition, some argue that publishing models based on APCs create barriers to publishing for authors from institutions and regions with fewer resources, increasing inequities in the scholarly communication system. Further, supporting APCs through this model channels funding to the largest publishers and diverts resources from other, more innovative, OA strategies, for example "diamond open access" which does not charge APCs at all. (See the "OA publishing initiatives" box below.) Finally, the APC model creates opportunities for low quality, "predatory" OA publishers. Therefore, it is possible that supporting read and publish agreements will slow the transition to OA, result in an OA system that costs more than it needs to, and decrease the diversity of scholarly voices.

Despite these reservations, URI currently participates in the read and publish agreements listed below.

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In "pure publish" agreements, URI pays a membership fee that fully covers or provides a discount to URI authors to publish in fully open access journals. Pure publish agreements are viewed by many open access advocates as being preferable to read and publish agreements, because with pure publish agreements the publisher is collecting fees only for their publication services. Pure publish agreements offer an alternative business model that does away with subscriptions and paywalls entirely. 

Our "pure publish" agreements are also listed below. (At this time they are ACM Open, PeerJ, PLOS, IGI Global, and MDPI.)

Hybrid open access describes open access provided by subscription journals to select articles. Authors must pay a publication fee to make their articles available open access. Except in cases when a publisher has made a public commitment to transition to full open access, open access advocates are critical of hybrid open access. Many publishers with hybrid options are not transparent about how or whether publication fees reduce subscription charges, and the growth of hybrid OA in recent years has not lead to an overall decrease in costs. There is little evidence that hybrid OA is helping bring about a transition to full open access; in fact, the opposite may be true.

Furthermore, hybrid OA APCs tend to be higher than APCs in fully OA journals. Before paying to publish in a hybrid journal, you may wish to check the DOAJ or other sites for fully OA journals in your field. Or, you can publish in a subscription journal for free and make your work open access by depositing your final peer-reviewed manuscript in DigitalCommons@URI in compliance with the URI Open Access Policy.

These hybrid OA publishers offer discounts to URI authors because the University Libraries subscribes to their content:

URI financially supports the following open access publishing initiatives:

URI financially supports the following open access / scholarly communication infrastructure initiatives:

For more information on URI's support for open access initiatives, contact Andrée Rathemacher at andree@uri.edu.