As part of our work with cOAlition S, Cottage Labs has been involved in tracking the details of Transformative Agreements, and especially the changing lists of institutions and journals to which they apply. We use this information to give authors up-to-date information about the agreements that cover their work, to ensure compliant Open Access publishing.Transformative Agreements are not a well-defined thing; in our work we have encountered many types of agreements with various strange internal structures and eligibility criteria. They canalso change who they apply to over time, and require substantial ongoing effort to keep up-to-date. Nonetheless, this effort is necessary if we are to provide authors with good, timely advice on their compliant Open Access publishing options, and to point themto resources to help them with their publication financing. There are also limits on what can be known about these agreements: there are many that are not on ESAC, the most authoritative register of these deals, and the actual finances backing these agreements areopaque. Even the formats of the agreements and the way that they are published online (if at all) provide challenges in extractinginformation.At Cottage Labs we have developed a variety of tools and processes to help us manage a large corpus of information aboutTransformative Agreements. This presentation will expose thedetailed internals of these agreements and the challenges involvedin tracking them, and how the data is used to support authors and institutions through cOAlition S tools.
Richard Jones (Mon,) studied this question.