A Transformative Agreement and its impact on open access equity

SUMMARY

The South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) members communicated their desire to grow their research agenda and article dissemination in June 2021. They wished to promote accessibility to local research for the growth of African society and to work with publishers to build a developmental programme to contribute to a long-term increase in publication output. Thanks to an existing long-lasting relationship between Wiley and SANLiC and Wiley’s willingness to deploy Transformational Agreements (TAs) in key markets globally, Wiley and SANLiC worked together to negotiate and launch a TA in January 2022.

With a focus on increasing Open Access (OA) equity, the Wiley-SANLiC TA sought to not only encourage a growth in OA article output from institutions in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, but to also tackle issues in inclusivity, social justice and equity through the delivery of an Author Engagement Programme (AEP). The AEP is an educational initiative providing support, tools and resources to enhance the research impact of authors, nurture future researchers in their own career progression and strengthen submission outcomes. Wiley also collaborated closely with the TA members and their OA administrators to further enhance the AEP and its activities to make sure they align with this local community’s specific needs and expectation. This approach included training sessions for local library staff enabling them to fully leverage the opportunities of the TA and AEP and easily manage the funding provided via this agreement.

The TA and its dedicated AEP have shown incredible metrics of success in terms of greater read usage, growth in article output, an increase in citations, a significant shift to OA in this region, an improvement in subject diversity and equally important to all of those – engagement with researchers across the region and amplification of underrepresented voices in global research.

WHAT ACTIONS WERE TAKEN?

Enabling access and APC coverage:  

• From 1 January 2022, the TA with SANLiC provides read access to the entire Wiley portfolio and enables the publication of OA articles for affiliated researchers in both Hybrid and fully OA ‘Gold’ journals, with no embargo and no out-of-pocket APCs for the author.

• A 49.3% increase has been seen in the number of articles published by affiliated researchers from 2021 to 2025. Most importantly, 94% of these published articles were under an OA license, compared to 17% in the year before the agreement began.

• The impact of these articles has also increased with a 105% citation uplift of articles published in the first year of the agreement.

• With full read access to the Wiley portfolio there has been a 81.3% growth in usage by member institutions from 2021 to 2025.

• Traditionally lesser-funded subject areas saw a growth in article output. Namely, the number of articles published in the Social & Behavioural Sciences increased by 113.2% between 2021 and 2025; increasing the representation of the discipline from 7% to 10% of all discipline output in the same time period.

Supporting Researchers through non-financial barriers to publication:  

• In addition to the traditional elements of a TA, the Wiley–SANLiC TA is unique in its inclusion of a dedicated Author Engagement Programme (AEP).

• This programme has reached over 5,000 researchers through a mix of virtual webinars, in-person workshops, the creation of special issues on select topics, additional engagement with individual institutions and editorial training.

Helping Early Career Researchers navigate the publishing process:  

A focus of the AEP has been to address topics such as effective journal selection, the benefits of OA, author best practices, navigating peer review, how to become a peer reviewer, maximizing the impact of research, strategies for successful publication across various disciplines and most recently AI tools for effective writing and research.