Read-and-Publish Agreements Explained

Your library may already have paid your open access fee. Whether it covers your paper depends on the corresponding author, the journal and the article type.

Explainer · 10 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

What a read and publish agreement is

Before these agreements, money reached a subscription publisher through two channels. The library paid a subscription so staff could read the journal, and an author who wanted one article open access paid an article processing charge (APC).

A read and publish agreement puts both channels into one contract. An institution, or a consortium negotiating for many institutions, pays a fee covering reading access for its staff and open access publication for its eligible authors' articles. Covered authors are not invoiced.

These deals are the most familiar kind of transformative agreement, called transitional agreements in the UK. OA Forward, successor to the ESAC Initiative since 2026, defines them as repurposing former subscription spending to pay for open access publishing, and calls them temporary and transitional. An agreement that covers you this year is a contract with an end date, not a permanent feature of the journal.

Read and publish vs publish and read

The two names describe how the institution's fee is calculated, not what the author receives. Jisc, which negotiates for UK institutions, sets out both in its guide to transitional agreement models.

Jisc names Germany's Projekt DEAL agreement with Wiley as the best-known publish and read example. It also describes a research-only variation of read and publish, most common among clinical publishers with a lot of non-research content: the model applies to research content while the rest stays paywalled. Publish and read has its own research-only variant, but there Jisc says all read content should be included free.

What the difference means in practice. For an eligible author, very little: in both models you publish open access without an invoice. For a research office it matters more, because under publish and read cost tracks output, so an institution that publishes heavily pays more and one that mainly reads pays less. When a consortium offers a deal, ask which model it uses and how your share is calculated.

Who pays, and where funders fit

Two things follow from the library holding the budget. Consortium agreements are usually opt-in, so a national deal does not by itself mean your institution signed up. And the money is finite and committed in advance, which is why the eligibility rules below exist.

Funder positions vary and have changed recently:

• cOAlition S confirmed that its members would stop financially supporting transformative arrangements after 2024, with exceptions possible for individual funders' national strategies. The same statement confirms that articles published open access under CC BY through such agreements still comply with Plan S.
• Wellcome states that from 1 January 2025 it will only fund article processing charges for research articles published in fully open access journals or platforms indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Its block grant does not cover contributions towards transformative agreements. Check the journal's DOAJ entry, not just its open access label.
• UKRI lets its block grant pay for hybrid journals only within a Jisc-approved transitional agreement the research organisation belongs to, and has committed to phasing out funding for hybrid publication even inside those agreements.

Treat the agreement and your funder's policy as separate questions. The agreement settles who pays the publisher; the funder's policy settles whether the licence, version and deposit meet its terms. Wellcome requires funded research to be freely available from Europe PMC on publication, whoever paid.

The eligibility checks that decide whether you are covered

An agreement covers articles that meet its conditions, not everyone at a participating institution. Terms differ, but these checks catch authors out most.

1. Corresponding author. Eligibility normally follows the corresponding author's affiliation, so a co-author at a covered institution does not bring the paper in. Some publishers use the corresponding author named at submission, so decide who that is when you plan the paper.
2. Affiliation in the manuscript. Publishers identify eligible authors from the stated affiliation, often matched to an institutional identifier or email domain. Use your institution's standard name and your institutional email address. Our guide to ORCID, affiliations and authorship covers writing an affiliation that systems can match.
3. Your contract, not your job title. In the UK, Jisc notes that eligibility is normally restricted to corresponding authors employed by the subscribing institution, not honorary, visiting or NHS staff without a contract. The same logic applies anywhere clinical and academic employment are separate: a consultant with an honorary university title, or a clinician at an institute outside the university's agreement, can be ineligible while feeling covered. Settle it in writing before submission if the paper is hospital-based.
4. Article type. Coverage is often limited to original research and review articles. This bites hardest in clinical journals, where much of the output is something else: case reports, clinical images, letters and editorials are frequently outside the agreement even when the journal is covered. Check the article-type list, and note that the type assigned at acceptance is the one that counts.
5. Journal list. An agreement may cover all of a publisher's journals or a named subset, and title lists change. Check the journal when you submit.
6. Timing and approval. Agreements often use the acceptance date to decide which period an article counts against. The library confirms each article after the publisher flags it, so answer eligibility requests promptly: ESAC recommended publishing eligible articles open access from the start, with later conversion only case by case.

Hybrid journals, fully open access journals and licences

Hybrid journals are subscription journals that let you make an individual article open access. They are what these agreements were built around, and coverage there is usually the most complete.

A publisher's fully open access journals are handled differently: some agreements include them, sometimes under a separate cap, and others give only an APC discount. The DEAL agreement with Wiley covers open access in Wiley's hybrid journals but discounts its fully open access titles. So the question is whether the agreement covers this journal on terms you can use. For a Wellcome-funded author the DOAJ condition above can point the other way, towards a fully open access title the agreement treats less generously.

Agreements generally publish covered articles under CC BY, which many funder policies require. If offered a choice at acceptance, check your funder's requirement before picking a more restrictive licence.

When the article allowance runs out

Not every agreement is capped. Jisc lists unlimited publishing for all authors at participating institutions among the features of an ideal agreement, but others set an allowance of articles, sometimes only for fully open access journals. What happens at the ceiling is not standard:

• Publishing stops. In many capped agreements the library stops approving new articles until the next period begins.
• Publishing continues and the overage is billed. Some pools are forecasts, not hard limits. In the CAUL consortium's agreement with Springer Nature, the consortium states that "publishing will not cease even in the event of the max being reached; a debit at average APC value will be accrued". The author pays nothing; the cost lands on the institution later.

Ask your library which kind yours is. When publishing does stop, what you do next depends on the journal:

• Hybrid journal. You can normally still publish through the subscription route with no APC, and meet open access requirements by depositing your accepted manuscript in a repository where the journal and your funder allow it. Our explainer on preprints, accepted manuscripts and versions of record sets out which version you can share.
• Fully open access journal. There is no subscription route, so you need other funding, a waiver or a different journal. Our guide to APC waivers and funding language covers what to ask for and when.
• Either. Ask the library whether another agreement or a central fund applies before paying personally.

If a paper may be accepted near the end of an agreement period, ask your library how much allowance remains. Cap status is a term of the agreement, so the library can usually tell you even when no figure is published.

How to find out what your institution has

Work through these sources in order:

1. Your library's open access pages. These usually list current agreements, eligible journals and a contact. The library is the definitive answer on whether you qualify.
2. The publisher. ESAC recommended that publishers tell authors when an agreement covers their fees, so read the prompts in the submission and acceptance steps rather than clicking past them.
3. OA Forward's Registry of Open Publishing Agreements (formerly ESAC's). It collects key terms of agreements worldwide, but records agreements, not whether you personally qualify.
4. Your national or regional consortium. Most countries negotiate through one, and many publish their terms directly. The CAUL consortium in Australia and New Zealand, for example, gives each agreement a page with the title list, eligible article types, participating institutions and cap status, medical publishers included. These pages are often more specific about article types than the publisher's own.
5. Funder tools. The cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool includes a transformative agreements search, and UK authors can use the Jisc transitional agreement lookup in Open Policy Finder.

What research offices should publish for authors

Most author queries repeat the same handful of questions, and one page answers them faster than a mailbox. Cover:

1. Every current agreement, with publisher, model, end date and title list
2. The corresponding author rule and which contracts qualify, honorary and clinical staff included
3. Article types covered under each agreement
4. Any caps, current usage, and what to do when a cap is reached
5. How your main funders' policies interact with each agreement
6. Expected approval time and a named contact
7. What to do if an eligible article was published without being claimed

ESAC's workflow recommendations give lists of eligible, rejected and opted-out articles as examples of what publisher reports should contain. Ask for them, and read the rejected entries: each points to a rule an author misunderstood or a workflow that failed.

Settle it before you choose the journal

The expensive moment to learn an agreement's rules is the week after acceptance. At the shortlist stage, ask your library one question per journal: is this title covered for this corresponding author and article type, and is there allowance left? The answer can change where you submit.

Whichever route pays for open access, the journal still has to be right for the paper. Directive Publications gathers its author guidance on the For Authors page, and you can contact the editorial team with questions before you submit.