New Feature: Institutional Agreement Reports

The feature is a response to the notoriously difficult agreements that exist between funders, institutions, and publishers, all having different commercial structures. Namely, funders and institutions typically sign agreements with publishers, giving them better terms when publishing articles. But these agreements come in different sizes and shapes. Read & Publish deals are the most common ones which allow authors to publish at no cost because the funder or institution has covered the cost via the agreement. Second to Read & Publish deals are discount deals which provide authors with a reduced rate when publishing in OA. As such, some deals cover parts of the cost, others cover all the cost. Some come with value caps or quota caps.

With multiple agreements signed with different publishers, institutions and funders are often challenged – and they’re reliant on access to dashboards or even Excel exports from the publishers. The same applies to the publishers who often spend resources entertaining the needs of the institutions and funders.

The Institutional Agreement Report offers a visual tracking tool which will help publishers, institutions, and funders ease and centralize the processes of overseeing the institutional agreements.

Publishers will get one source of truth with all agreements collected in one view with the option to drill down on consortia, institution, and article level. Likewise, they can offer institutions access to their own agreements, providing them the option to analyze and download the data.

Institutions and funders can consolidate and set up all their institutional agreements in one place and track agreement performance against potential quotas.

Common to all three is the option to choose to make agreements available in a public journal finder, giving the authors easy access to any agreement.