Transformative agreement is an umbrella term for an agreement between institutions and publishers in which the agreement includes the ability for an institution to not only read from a set of journals, but for author article processing fees as well. These agreements stand in contrast to the previously typical license agreement, which only provided reading access, leaving faculty to negotiate with publishers independently.

Copyright. While it depends on the agreement, transformative agreements tend to require that copyright is retained by the author and not shifted to the publisher. A common way the agreement is satisfied is by author's agreeing to apply a Creative Commons license to the article. The retention of copyright by the author when publishing in scholarly journals is not a given, nor are all faculty aware that they've given away the rights to their article when they agreed to publish.

Costs. These agreements are often part of a library's effort to shift the publishing ecosystem toward that of open access. They also give libraries the ability to minimize the impact of rising publishing costs for institutions and individual faculty. For faculty, transformative agreements can eliminate article processing charges, which can be a significant barrier to publication.

Below is a current list of the transformative publishing agreements available to Fairfield University staff and faculty.

Note: A 'corresponding author' is the primary contact between author(s) and publisher during the submission and publication process.