Over the past few years, the most significant trend in academic publishing has arguably been in the introduction of so-called Transformative Agreements. These agreements aim to repurpose the funds paid out by libraries for subscription fees, instead redirecting them to cover the publishing fees required to make articles open-access and freely available to the public.

Earlier this month a new transformative agreement was signed between Elsevier and the Canadian Knowledge Resource Network (CRKN), a partnership of 85 libraries and research institutions across Canada. This means that corresponding authors at McGill will benefit from unlimited open access publishing at no cost in more than 1,800 Elsevier hybrid journals in this list; for these journals the article processing charge (APC) will be completely waived. For Gold Access journals there is a 20% reduction in the APC. The agreement will last three years, from January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2026 inclusive. When submitting an article, make sure that you use your McGill email in order to be eligible, and be sure to check out the detailed instructions before submitting.

We at the Library are very excited about this new agreement and we hope that it leads to many more McGill authors being able to publish their work without worrying about publishing fees, while also being able to more easily satisfy the Tri-Council Open Access Funding Policy.

If you’d like more help or information from us, you can get in touch with your liaison librarian, or with our Scholarly Communications Team. If you’d like more information about transformative agreements and this new deal with Elsevier, CRKN have published a press release as well as the text of the full agreement with Elsevier.