Repository Role in Transformative Agreement Implementation

As the publishing landscape continues to evolve, libraries and publishers are experimenting with a wide range of new types of open access publishing agreements, and KAUST has been able to make transformative agreements with several STEM publishers. However, the related workflows are not yet mature, and differ greatly across publishers. Ideally, all available funds (free tokens / free article processing charges) covered by transformative agreements should be used and eligible articles should have immediate open access. What happens is that sometimes the author is not aware of the deal or did not properly follow the workflow, so eligible articles are published behind the paywall, or published as open access, but paid outside the deal. When this happens, the library tries to get the article published as open access retroactively or to get a refund if possible. To help address this, the repository team made several improvements to the existing publications tracking service, developing a mechanism to track and identify eligible articles, including an email alert and a dashboard page, to help the librarians managing transformative agreements monitor articles covered by the agreements