Background

The link between an agreement, its participating institutions, and the journals it covers comes from a voluntary, partly manual process, rather than an authoritative feed from publishers.

How the data is assembled

  1. A publisher and a library consortium (or a single institution) negotiate a transformative agreement.
  2. The consortium or institution registers it in the ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry. Sharing the terms is voluntary, and agreements are registered at the consortium level rather than per member.
  3. The Journal Checker Tool (JCT) data team monitors ESAC regularly for new agreements, then contacts each consortium for the covered titles and the institutions with access.
  4. The JCT publishes the result as CC0 “Transformative Agreements Public Data” with an API.
  5. This site consumes that data and matches agreements to TU9 universities by ROR ID.

A single agreement can provide different institutions with access to different title sets. The JCT records this in its per-agreement sheets. There is no fixed one-to-one relationship between an agreement and its journal or institution lists.

How this site matches agreements

An agreement is listed for a university when one of the university’s ROR IDs appears among the agreement’s participating institutions. A university is represented by the ROR IDs listed for its slug in data-raw/orgs.csv, including libraries and university hospitals when those units have separate ROR IDs. The members_ror column records which of those ROR IDs were matched for each agreement.

Sources