Tracking transformative agreements through open metadata

Poster presented at the 17th Berlin Open Access Conference. This poster presents a method for calculating which articles have been covered by transformative agreements by using exclusively open metadata sources. The sources used are the Journal Checker Tool as developed by cOAlition S in combination with corresponding institution data from OpenAlex. The openness of this data allows everyone interested to determine from a given corpus of publications whether or not they were likely covered by a transformative agreement, without having access to the actual publisher’s data. To demonstrate the potential use of the method, we have applkies it to a dataset of publications funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and its sister council for health research ZonMw. We have validated this method using the actual publisher data provided to the Dutch Library Consortium UKB, showing that this open method accurately identified 89% of the publications covered by transformative agreements, while the 11% false positives shed an interesting light on the limitations of this method. In the absence of hard, openly available article‐level data on transformative agreements, we provide researchers and institutions with a powerful tool to critically track and evaluate the impact of these agreements.