Publisher agreements
What are read and publish agreements?
Read and publish agreements (also called transformative agreements) are negotiated by the National Library of Sweden through the Bibsam consortium. With the agreements the university is part of, the library pays a yearly fee to publishers, so that our researchers don't get any article processing charges (or discounted article processing charges) for open access in selected journals.
What do you have to do to use the agreements?
The requirement for taking part of an agreement through the University of Borås is that the greater part of the research an article is based on should have been done while at UB. It is also important that the corresponding author lists UB as their main affiliation, and use their @hb email address in the publisher's system. In cases where the corresponding author is at another university that is part of Bibsam the same agreement can be used, but this will then be administrated by the relevant university.
What is the practical process?
The various publishers have different processes. Usually the author is asked to choose an open access option, and then the library is contacted to check that the author details are correct. If it's not immediately clear that the article should be handled by HB we might contact the author, or reject the article. Otherwise we approve the article as soon as we have checked it, without the author having to do anything further to make this happen.
How do I know if a particular journal is part of our agreements?
First you need to find out which publisher publishes the journal. Then you can go through the publishers listed on this page to see if it is part of our agreements. Please note that some publishers don't include all journals in the agreements.
What does the number of articles per year mean?
This information is included to show what kind of agreements we have with different publishers. Even if the maximum number of articles in an agreement is reached, the library will cover open access charges in the eligible journals.
Questions?
If you have questions about any of our agreements, or about open access to research, please email librarian Signe Wulund.
