The impact of Read & Publish agreements on Australia’s open access landscape [lightning talk]

After some pilots with small publishers in previous years, 2022 saw Australia’s first open access publishing agreements with major scholarly publishers. Now, in 2024, there are 25 agreements on offer through the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), which negotiates and manages the agreements on behalf of Australian universities.

Most of these are Read and Publish (R&P) agreements built on existing library subscriptions, and there are now agreements in place with the ‘big five’ commercial publishers, as well as several university presses and society publishers. These CAUL R&P agreements covered about 430 papers in 2021, over 11,000 in 2022, and almost 23,000 in 2023. Few of the major agreements cover publishing in fully open access (gold) journals, though, resulting in an explosion in ‘hybrid’ open access publishing in subscription journals in recent years.

This lightning talk examines the impact of the CAUL R&P agreements on the open access landscape in Australia, including authors’ uptake of different open access pathways and compliance with funder mandates. It also reflects on the challenges and risks associated with the R&P model and the need to foster diverse approaches to open scholarship.