Beyond the Big Deals: Partnerships for Equity & Impact in Open Access

If you were in Charleston this past November, you know what I mean when I say the air was thick with purpose, and a little bit of worry. The Charleston Conference is always a place where librarians and publishers come together to discuss the tough questions facing our industry, and this year highlighted that scholarly communication is evolving against a backdrop of economic, technological, and policy-driven uncertainty.

Frankly, budgetary uncertainty was the elephant in the room in nearly every discussion. We heard repeatedly that institutions are wrestling with proposed significant funding cuts and are focused on figuring out how to "do more with fewer resources." This pressure forces tough, data-driven decisions about what to keep and what to let go of.

Amid this turbulence, the core mission of librarians remains clear to prioritize two main goals: 1) ensuring content access and 2) supporting the open access publishing needs of their faculty. But how we achieve that second goal is where we need to roll up our sleeves.

The Trade-Off: Efficiency vs. Equity

Transformative Agreements (TAs) have been widely adopted as the primary engine driving the transition to Open Access (OA). On the surface, TAs offer simplicity: one negotiation can unlock OA publishing for institutional researchers while maintaining reading access to journal collections. For budget-constrained libraries managing hundreds of individual article processing charges (APCs), this administrative consolidation seems like an obvious win.

But TAs come with a big risk: they can wind up concentrating publishing power among the very large commercial entities the OA movement was intended to disrupt. This is what we're calling the "Indie Squeeze." Independent, mission-driven OA publishers, the society publishers, university presses, and pioneers like JMIR who built sustainable open access models when commercial giants still defended paywalls, are finding themselves outside this massive ecosystem. Institutional OA budgets flow increasingly toward funding large TA deals, leaving independent publishers struggling to compete for authors and institutional support.

The consequences of this consolidation became strikingly clear at Charleston, and they should concern everyone committed to genuine open access: 

• Lost Data, Lost Bibliodiversity: When larger libraries analyze the impact of their TAs, they typically do not consider publishing activity occurring outside those large agreements. This oversight obscures the true impact on bibliodiversity; the variety, quality, and diversity of research output. If we're only measuring what happens within TA portfolios, we're missing the fuller picture of institutional publishing patterns and inadvertently incentivizing homogeneity.
• Unaware of Impact: Institutions with extensive TA portfolios acknowledged being "unaware of impact on policy (society) and prestige" resulting from their publishing choices. One major university with over 40 TAs couldn't articulate how those agreements shaped their institutional research profile, policy influence, or real-world impact. There's an opportunity here to better measure and understand the full consequences of these agreements.
• Equity Concerns: TAs create powerful incentives for researchers to publish exclusively within covered portfolios. Why navigate separate APC payments when "free" options exist within the TA? This dynamic disadvantages researchers who need to publish in specialized independent journals serving their fields, effectively limiting publishing choice under the guise of expanding it.

Yet here's an important opportunity that emerged from Charleston discussions: TA budgets are split and can now be categorized as part access and part publishing services fees. This accounting distinction opens strategic possibilities for institutions to redirect some resources toward alternative models that deliver better value, support publisher diversity, and operationalize equity more effectively than TAs alone can achieve.

Building a Stronger Foundation: Operationalizing Equity

If the goal is genuine diversity, innovation, and equity in scholarly publishing, not just cost efficiency, then supporting independent OA models isn't merely an ethical choice. It's a strategic necessity for securing a resilient, diverse scholarly ecosystem.

JMIR's Institutional Partnerships (IPFs) offer a concrete way to meet budget pressures while delivering on OA values that TAs often fall short of realizing. These models provide real administrative relief by simplifying APC management, rolling complex, labor-intensive tasks into predictable annual agreements, while directing resources to publishers genuinely committed to open access principles.

This approach matters because it allows libraries and consortia to:

• Fund the Mission: Direct institutional funds to publishers with longstanding commitments to open access and open research, not entities that reluctantly adopted OA under market pressure while maintaining exploitative profit margins.
• Operationalize Equity: By eliminating financial barriers for publishing through institutional partnerships, libraries ensure that early-career researchers lacking substantial grant funding can publish on equal footing with their better-funded colleagues. This actively democratizes scholarly communication rather than simply talking about democratization.
• Support Bibliodiversity: Strategic partnerships with independent publishers maintain ecosystem diversity. Different publishers bring different editorial approaches, serve different communities, and advance different aspects of scholarly communication. Concentrating resources among the largest commercial giants impoverishes this diversity.
• Demonstrate Value: Institutional partnerships generate quantifiable outcomes— APC savings, increased institutional research visibility, measurable impact metrics—that are vital for securing continued institutional investment and demonstrating library value amid budget scrutiny.

The Bibsam Consortium's partnership with JMIR demonstrates this model's potential. Swedish researchers can publish unlimited articles across JMIR's portfolio without individual APC payments, which has increased the volume and speed of publication by removing financial and administrative hurdles. The administrative elegance rivals any TA, but the funds support a mission-driven publisher advancing digital health research and open science principles rather than enriching commercial shareholders. We need to stop accepting publishing consolidation as an inevitable outcome and start supporting independent solutions that truly serve the scholarly community.

The Path Forward

If Charleston 2025 taught us anything, it's that we're in constant motion, facing strong headwinds. Budget cuts, shifting funding priorities, technological disruption, consolidation pressures are not temporary challenges we'll ride out. They are the new normal.

Supporting independent, mission-driven open access is how we adjust. This isn't about incremental fixes or defending the status quo. It's about making deliberate, strategic investments that secure a resilient, diverse, and equitable scholarly ecosystem. It's about ensuring that the transition to open access doesn't simply transfer monopoly power from subscription models to TA models, concentrating publishing in even fewer hands.

Libraries have agency in shaping this future. The choices you make about which publishers to partner with, which models to support, and how to allocate constrained budgets collectively determine whether we achieve the open, equitable scholarly communication system the OA movement envisioned, or simply recreate existing power structures under new economic models.

An Invitation to Partnership

The conversations in Charleston reinforced our conviction that librarians, independent publishers, and researchers share fundamentally aligned goals: ensuring research is openly accessible, supporting diverse scholarly voices, maintaining quality and rigor, and advancing knowledge for societal benefit.

We invite librarians, researchers, and consortia to reach out. Let's have honest conversations about:

• How our institutional partnership can fit within your OA strategy alongside TAs
• What metrics would demonstrate value to your stakeholders
• How we can collaborate on discovery, workflow, and impact measurement
• What barriers prevent you from supporting independent publishers more robustly

Together, we can ensure that your institutional resources drive the equitable, diverse, open future we all know is possible. Ready to explore how a JMIR Institutional Partnership can support your open access mandate while ensuring your funds drive equity and bibliodiversity? Contact our Institutional Licensing Team: partnerships@jmir.org.

References: 

Burton, K., Keeping Up With…Predatory Publishing. https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/predatory_publishing. 

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