Niklas Willén, National Library of Sweden The Bibsam Consortium consists of 90 Swedish research institutions that has agreements with all major academic publishers. Bibsam has been on the Open Access frontlines and has under the last 10 years completely moved away from read-only agreements, and has now a portfolio of over 25 transformative agreements. With this transition follows new ways to evaluate agreement performance. This presentation focuses on some of the challenges that the Bibsam Consortium is facing with transformative agreements. New evaluation methods is one aspect, but also the effort to move from legacy price models to a new price redistribution based on publishing output.

1. Old prices are old
− New evaluation methods and price redistribution in Swedish transformative agreements

2. Thanks and apologies…

3. • 95 participating institutions
• 49 (opt-in) agreements, 34 ”transformative”
• 50 million € yearly turnover
(68% of the total expenditure for scientific publishing)
• 16 000 Open Access articles yearly
• Administrated by the National Library of Sweden
The Bibsam Consortium
The National Library of Sweden shall promote and
coordinate the work of introducing open access to
scholarly publications.
- Government Directive 2022

4. Bibsam’s Preconditions
• Immediate open access to all articles published by
researchers affiliated with participating organisations (both in
hybrid and fully open access journals) with CC-BY license
• Continued reading access for participating organisations to
previous subscribed content.
• A sustainable price model that enables a transition to open
access and allows for a redirection of revenue streams
• Contract renewal must include an open access provision, if
no acceptable open access provision is offered, the contract
renewal will be limited to one year or even cancelled.

5. Open Access Agreements

6. 82 % Coverage

7. Transformative Agreement A
- Price
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
+33%
Read Agreement Read & Publish

8. Transformative Agreement A
- Publishing
+55%
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2022

9. How do we measure
performance?
• PAR Fee – easy to understand but hard
to compare
• Usage of closed articles (COUNTER)
– comparable but unreliable and
depends on portal
• Cites – good, but we don’t have the
manpower…
• Published articles – better, but number
of articles is not enough
• APC list price – gives a better
indication of the added value

10. APC list
price
• Some agreement are over
100%
• No connection to price
increases
• 10% of the added value
• Cost of reading?
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 120% 140%
Agreement F
Agreement E
Agreement D
Agreement C
Agreement B
Agreement A
Total Value of Agreement
APC list price share of total Read & Publish
agreement value

11. Old prices are old
• Based on print subscriptions
• New price models over time
− FTE
• Students
• Factulty
− Carnegie Classification
− Usage (!)
• Complex internal redistributions
”Your price is much lower
than it should be”
- Ancient sales argument

12. Unbalanced price distribution
0%
2%
4%
6%
8%
10%
12%
14%
%
share
in
agreement
Bibsam Institutions
Share of published articles Price 2022
Well stocked
Became a
university

13. • Roberts Consultancy 2019
• A fair price model
• Recommendations for cost redistributions
• Model C:
− 10% entry fee (i.e. Read Fee)
• Reflect institution size
− 90% publish fee
• More publish = more fee
• Less overall impact if more agreements are
redistributed at the same time
Cost distribution

14. 90/10 Application Example
A large university
• 200 articles (13,3%)
• 2 500 FTE (6,3%)
A university college
• 20 articles (1,3%)
• 900 FTE (2.3%)
Small research institution
• No publishing (0%)
• 50 FTE (0,13%)
Publishing 90%
€ 90 000
Reading 10%
€ 10 000
100 000 € Read &
Publish Agreement Publishing Fee
€ 12 000
Read Fee
€ 625
Publishing Fee
€ 1 200
Read Fee
€ 225
Read Fee
€ 13
95%
5%
84%
16%
Floor Price
€ 700

15. Dampeners
-60%
-40%
-20%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
140%
Increase Limit
Decrase Limit
Floor Price Minimum
Price increase limit +50%
Price decrease limit -20%
• Why +50 and -20%
• How much impact from dampeners?
• Is reading not important anymore?
• Why not factoring in the students?

16. Implementation
• 90/10 redistribution model simulated for all
agreements
• Four agreements went on referral round
• ACS 2023
• Some conclutions:
− Not all agreement needs redistributing
− Publishers needs to be involved
− A new price model is better

17. Thank you!