Introduction

In the seventeenth century, the first scientific journals appeared in a form close to what we know today (Philosophical Transactions and Journal des Sçavans, both founded in 1665). At that stage, the primary goal of scientific communities was to disseminate research findings, with knowledge remaining under their control and journals being exchanged on a non-profit basis. With some adaptations, scientific publishing remained this way until the mid-twentieth century. After World War II, however, a conceptual shift occurred that profoundly distorted the scientific communication system: certain groups, mainly in the North Atlantic, began to regard scientific publishing as a profitable business and reoriented it toward a commercial perspective. In this shift, knowledge was converted into a commodity, and the processes of privatization and appropriation of the public good took place. “Transformative agreements” can be considered the latest step in this process, which is why it is crucial to study them empirically.

With globalization, new forms of disseminating knowledge emerged, now embedded in a prestige system structured around categories such as “quality” and “internationalization”, and increasingly governed by market logic. The foundations of this new context can be traced back to Robert Maxwell, who in the 1950s founded Pergamon Press. To sustain his publishing house, he lobbied scientific communities to establish specialized journals and publish in them, in exchange for what from then on was recognized as “academic prestige”. Later, Pergamon Press was sold to Elsevier. Subsequently, Benjamin Lewin founded the journal Cell and the publisher Cell Press, which accepted only manuscripts deemed exceptional. In turn, publishing in Cell became synonymous with “prestige” for researchers ^{(Guédon, 2008: 3} ; ^{2014: 90}; ^{Resco, 2021)} .

This case exemplifies the conceptual and instrumental turn described above: it was no longer enough to publish; from that point on, it was necessary to publish in a “prestigious” journal, with prestige now defined and determined by the commercial publishing industry. This marked the beginning of a process of “expropriation” of the legitimacy of non-profit journals and universities, whereby the knowledge they produced was subordinated to the prestige conferred by the commercial publishing system of the twenty-first century.

In the 1960s, Eugene Garfield created the Journal Citation Index, which measures the average number of citations received by an article based on a specific set (“the core”) of journals. This innovation was key to consolidating the radical shift in journal publishing: its primary purpose was no longer to disseminate knowledge but to integrate itself into a prestige industry organized around citation systems controlled by the publishing sector itself. In turn, this system established what came to be regarded as “the core”, “the mainstream”, or the “principal current” of science ^{(Guédon, 2008: 6)} . In other words, publication ceased to be primarily a means of communication and became the raw material for an evaluation system that was still under construction. Under this model, journals that had already ceased to function as communication organs became the foundation of a new evaluation system and even proxies for the quality of research itself. The main effect of this reconfiguration was the establishment of a new form of evaluation based on citations, references to journals included in “the core” of knowledge. This marked the beginning of the “fetishization of indexing” ^{(Salatino and López-Ruiz, 2021)} , which does not align with the interests of the scientific community or the complex global, national, and local challenges it faces, but rather with the interests of the publishing market.

In parallel, a fundamental phenomenon emerged: access to scientific contributions published in these journals was granted only through payment (subscriptions). In other words, the publishing model that took shape as a commodity was a closed one. However, although this was a commercial model, it was legitimized through selection criteria and the “prestige” that became synonymous with “quality”. Yet, alongside these journals there remained a majority of others that also offered “high quality,” but lacked prestige and recognition.

By the end of the twentieth century, it had already become common practice for universities to pay subscriptions to commercial publishers in order to access knowledge considered “high quality”. However, toward the end of that century, the so-called “serials crisis” erupted, characterized by exponential increases in subscription prices and the imposition of “Big Deals”, that is, bundled subscriptions that promoted and included journals of limited recognition but under commercial control ^{(Melero, 2005: 255)} . In this way, “the core” was imposed through marketing strategies. Prices became unsustainable for many institutions and governments. Prominent cases included universities in the United States and Western Europe such as Stanford, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke, Cornell, Connecticut, the University of California, and North Carolina State University ^{(Dyer, 2004: 543)} . Even the wealthiest universities admitted they could no longer afford access to all the journals they deemed important, and physical space for storing publications became a problem. This situation was a turning point that triggered debates about the need to rethink the commercial model of scholarly communication. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussions emerged about the necessity of implementing what came to be known as “Open Access” (OA), a concept born from the effort to overcome economic and subscription barriers that restricted access to scientific publications ^{(Suber, 2012)} .

Although regions such as Latin America, though not exclusively, were already communicating their scholarly output under an OA scheme without charging for publishing or access, the official definition of OA was articulated through declarations issued in Europe. These outlined two routes to achieve it: the gold route and the green route ^{(Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002}; ^{Max Planck Society, 2003)}. The gold route refers to peer-reviewed scientific journals, shifting from subscription fees to publication fees (Article Processing Charges, APCs). The green route refers to the deposit of publications and other contributions, not necessarily peer-reviewed, in repositories intended, among other purposes, to preserve institutional memory and make it available to the communities funding it and to the wider world.

In pursuit of openness, specifically in the European context, strategies were introduced such as the ERC Guidelines for OA established in 2007 ^{(European Research Council, 2007)}; the Science Europe Principles on OA to Research Publications of 2013, updated in 2015 ^{(Science Europe, 2015)}; and the 2016 resolution by European science and innovation ministries, gathered at the Competitiveness Council ^{(Schiltz, 2018)} . One of the latest strategies proposed by cOAlition S to achieve full openness of academic literature is Plan S.

Plan S is a policy introduced in 2018 by cOAlition S—a consortium of 28 research funding organizations supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council—with the goal of opening access to scientific contributions ^{(cOAlition S, 2018a}, ²⁰¹⁹⁾. Plan S emerged in a context where funding agencies expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that research results were being published in journals that restricted access to society at large, while institutional repositories had failed to persuade researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed publications there ^{(Hernández-Pérez, 2019: 2)} . To achieve its goal, Plan S implemented a variety of strategies, most notably “transformative agreements”, “model transformative agreements”, and “transformative journals”. The present analysis focuses on transformative agreements.

So-called “transformative agreements” are contracts between publishers and institutions, libraries, or consortia that establish the conditions for both access to a bundle of journals (subscriptions) and the publication of articles within them, under fees agreed upon in a single contract and including charges for publication or processing (APCs). The defining feature of such agreements is that payments formerly directed toward subscriptions are redirected toward publication costs ^{(Bieg, 2022; Hinchliffe, 2019)} . This constitutes a major change in the publishing system that, under the discourse of openness, refunctionalizes the appropriation of knowledge as a public good. Although there is no universal typology of agreements, at least two types have been documented: Publish & Read agreements, under which publication fees cover both the institution’s authors and reading access to all journals, and Read & Publish agreements, under which the publisher receives one payment for reading and another for publishing under the same contract ^{(Marquez Rangel et al., 2023: 84)} .

The ESAC (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges)¹ initiative maintains a registry of agreements and highlights five main characteristics they must fulfill within the Plan S framework: (a) they must be temporary and transitional, (b) they must allow authors to retain the intellectual property of their publications, (c) they must be transparent, and (d) their clauses must be publicly accessible. Their stated objective is to reduce the cost of academic publications and promote greater equity within the academic community (ESAC, n.d.), a purpose that, evidently, has not yet been achieved.

Transformative agreements did not originate with Plan S; rather, Plan S institutionalized and globalized them. Among the earlier transformative agreements, the most prominent are those signed by Springer in 2015 with UK universities (represented by Jisc), and by Elsevier in 2019 with German universities (represented by the Max Planck Digital Library). These were the first large-scale transformative agreements.

In 2015, the Max Planck Society also launched the “OA2020” project with the aim of promoting the global transition of scientific content to open access. This project was highly influential on Plan S and is recognized as the source of the term “transformative agreements”.

The agreements have been approached from different perspectives. Some scholars argue that they represent a fast track to OA, but they are also exclusionary, as they are only available to countries and institutions with sufficient funds to afford them ^{(Shearer, 2022)} . Others point out that the lack of transparency in subscription and APC costs makes it difficult to assess whether they actually reduce the overall expenses of scholarly communication ^{(Anglada and Borrego, 2023: 1)} . Still others contend that for contracts to be genuinely “transformative”, they must allow unlimited publication without closed lists of journals, and warn that their adoption may sideline alternative approaches that could strengthen the OA publishing ecosystem ^{(Martínez Galindo et al., 2023: 97-98)} .

Regarding the Latin American publishing ecosystem, it has a longstanding open and collaborative tradition. The region views knowledge as a public and common good, disseminated through journals that charge neither authors nor readers, with universities serving as the backbone of open access publishing. Latin America has sustained a non-commercial OA model for more than three decades, supported by numerous repositories that freely and openly provide access to research outputs published in regional journals.

One of the key milestones in opening knowledge in Latin America took place from November 27 to 30, 1994, during the workshop “Scientific Publications in Latin America”, held in Guadalajara, Mexico. “One of the most significant outcomes was perhaps the proposal to establish a permanent regional network of scientific editors, one of whose first tasks would be (…) the creation of a database of the region’s scientific journals”. At the same time, however, UNESCO, through Professor Adnan Badran, emphasized a persistent tension: “...the lack of presence in major international indexes” ^{(Cetto, 1993}; ^{Cetto and Hillerud, 1995)}. This marked the consolidation of Latin America’s collaborative and non-commercial openness, leading to the establishment of key information infrastructures. Building on earlier projects such as Biblat (1971), CLASE (1975), Periódica (1978)—all developed by UNAM—and Lilacs (1982) in Brazil, important regional initiatives emerged, including Latindex, SciELO Brazil, and IRESIE in 1997, CLACSO in 1998, Redalyc in 2003, REMERI in 2012, La Referencia in 2013, and AmeliCA in 2019, along with multiple national and institutional repositories.

This situation reveals a persistent and unresolved tension that has marked the uncertainty of the Global South’s publishing system. On the one hand, there is a pressing need to develop regional and national infrastructures that provide visibility to Latin American journals on the global stage. On the other hand, there is the desire to be included in international indexes, albeit under rules defined by impact factors and citation counts. How many thousands of pages have we written lamenting the lack of representation in the “core” or “mainstream”? In doing so, we contribute to our own marginalization. Although most infrastructures (Latindex, CLACSO, Redalyc, and AmeliCA) have opposed this model and published countless critiques, the international mainstream model, legitimized regionally through SciELO, has generated a contradiction we cannot overcome. Hence this warning regarding transformative agreements: national science and technology organizations (ONCyTs) and institutions have “bought into” and aligned their internal processes with the mainstream and ranking models, undermining previous efforts, disregarding non-commercial infrastructures, and perpetually devaluing institutional publishing systems that remain underfunded, except for those included in the “core” or “mainstream”.

Within this specific Latin American context, the strategy promoted by cOAlition S has sparked debate and concern among the region’s academic community. Overall, it has been noted that for the region to integrate into the Plan S model, the plan proposes exemption policies and equitable APC payments. However, this model is unsustainable for the region because it is based on a commercial approach to scholarly communication, in contrast to the non-commercial mechanisms long established in Latin America ^{(Becerril-García, 2019)} . Moreover, the solution is not exemption or charity, nor the notion of a “fair price”—if such a thing exists. The issue is the appropriation of a public good which, in the Latin American case, is largely financed with public funds. This is the critical point. For the region, joining the global conversation means abandoning its cooperative model, closely aligned with societal needs, in favor of a commercial model that commodifies knowledge and in which significant academic sectors are inevitably excluded. This is not the way forward.

The strategies proposed by Plan S demonstrate concern for inequity in access to knowledge but fail to address inequity in publication and avoid questioning the problem of control by a small number of powerful publishing houses. Latin American scientific communities have emphasized that Plan S disregards the fact that its strategies negatively affect regions with distinct scholarly communication structures, such as Latin America, where there is a strong tradition of non-commercial publishing. The exemption policies and discounted APCs that Plan S proposes for regions like ours are insufficient mechanisms for opening scholarly communication and do not structurally address the persistent problems of exclusion in both access and publication ^{(Debat and Babini, 2020: 282)} .

Other communities in the region have pointed out that while Plan S seeks to eliminate paywalls to achieve open access, it does not aim to reduce the concentration of power and profits enjoyed by a handful of commercial publishers ^{(Aguado-López and Becerril-García, 2020)} . In Latin America, the “transformative” strategy promoted by Europe is especially concerning, as it has been argued that it hinders a comprehensive and sustainable transition to open science and undermines the OA models that have operated in the region for decades ^{(Becerril-García and Córdoba González, 2024: 257)}.

Against this backdrop, it becomes essential to analyze how the Plan S model is being configured in Latin America, a region with a non-commercial scholarly publishing system that has demonstrated sustainability for decades. The Latin American model tends to emphasize the importance of scientific communication as a process of democratization and regional identity-building. Specifically, the objective of this paper is to analyze the Latin American institutions and countries that have entered into “transformative agreements”, identifying the publishing groups with which these agreements were signed and examining their specific conditions: the volume of articles permitted, rights of use and access, and whether the journals included belong to the so-called “core”, “mainstream”, or “principal current” of science.

The study suggests that the adoption of such agreements in Latin America represents the implementation of a model rooted in the commercialization of knowledge, given that the strategy promoted by Plan S: (1) perpetuates commercial practices such as APCs; (2) strengthens the presence and control of a small group of powerful publishers in scholarly communication; (3) does not guarantee that scientific contributions published in this context will not be commercialized in the future; and (4) fails to structurally alter the evaluation and publication culture centered on the “core”, “mainstream”, or “principal current”, since it continues to direct scholarly publishing toward journals with the highest citation-based metrics in this circuit.

Methodology

The research was conducted to analyze the characteristics of the agreements implemented under the Plan S and thereby characterizing the publishing model that is taking shape in Latin America through these agreements. The study universe comprises information on 37 agreements negotiated by six institutions across three Latin American countries:

It should be noted that PUJ is one of the institutions that make up Consorcio Colombia, and therefore it is already included in the three agreements signed by the consortium. To avoid duplicating information, the analysis of Consorcio Colombia considered its three agreements, while the analysis of PUJ included only the two agreements established independently of the consortium.

The information was collected between November 15, 2023, and January 31, 2024. The data sources were the official websites of each institution, where information regarding the respective agreements was made publicly available (see List 2).

The study analyzes three main aspects:

Results

The identification of the communities that have formalized agreements aligned with the publishing policy proposed by Plan S indicates that, as of January 2024, the Latin American countries engaged in such agreements are Colombia, Mexico, and Chile. The participating institutions are the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), Consorcio Colombia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ), and Universidad de Concepción (UdeC).

Discussion

The model of scientific communication—particularly through peer-reviewed journals—has been commercialized. A “core” has been established that has replaced them as communication structures and positioned them instead as evaluation structures, based on the citation impact of journals within the “core” and on indicators such as the Impact Factor (IF) or Scimago Journal Rank (SJR). Visibility, quality, and equity are defined in a circular manner by what is contained in the “core”. Their alignment with values and strategies is determined by the “core”, raising the question of whether it can be articulated with values and principles grounded in the idea that knowledge, science, and journals are public goods, and whether institutions from the Global South, and particularly Latin America, are included in this model. At the outset, the answer is no, since the vast majority of these journals are owned by commercial publishers, with the implications previously discussed. The “core”—even when open—is in contradiction with non-commercial OA, science, and journals as public goods. This permanent tension effectively excludes the regional publishing system, and when it participates in the so-called “global conversation”, meaning the “core”, it must pay significant amounts in APCs.

As this model is imposed through evaluation systems based on indicators such as IF-WoS-Clarivate and SJR-Scopus-Elsevier, and despite digital technologies enabling knowledge to be shared as a public good (Budapest Open Access Initiative: Recommendations on its 20th Anniversary, 2022), there emerged a search for a model of OA based on the recognition that there can be no meaningful knowledge without access to global research results. However, and this is the central point of discussion, a key question remains: Is it possible to modify the commercial communication model and return control to universities and research centers in order to achieve the goals of OA—without distortion—as envisioned in Budapest and BOAI20?

This concern has been the subject of extensive debate in initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, 2012), the Latin American Forum on Scientific Evaluation (FOLEC, 2019), the Leiden Manifesto ^{(Hicks et al., 2015)} , the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication ^{(Federation of Finnish Learned Societies et al., 2019)}, and the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information ^{(Kramer et al., 2024)} , among many others. These initiatives have sought to improve and develop evaluation systems to make them fairer, more transparent, and more effective, although with limited results.

In recent decades, the tension and strategies have centered on the possibility of constructing an alternative model. The North has sought to do so without altering the commercial framework: knowledge resides in the “core”, which must simply be made global and open, later adding “academic ownership” and charging authors through APCs. In contrast, the Global South—especially Latin America—developed a collaborative model funded by universities, later termed the “diamond” model. What are the differences? How do “transformative agreements” affect or potentially undermine this model? Latin America has not only sustained a non-commercial tradition for more than three decades, with specific OA legislation, but has also expanded these policies toward Open Science in line with UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science^{(UNESCO, 2021)}.

cOAlition S has argued that in Latin America, access to scientific publications has always been open, and while the region was advancing OA correctly, the rest of the world was overtaken by commercial publishers who extracted enormous profits from research communities in the North and the West. Yet, publishers cannot simply be wished away; hence, Plan S engages with them through “transparent” and “transformative” agreements ^{(Rooryck, 2019)} . However, as admitted by its own leadership, Plan S’s objectives are inherently limited.

The articulation of cOAlition S clarified the distinction between Plan S and other global OA initiatives. From the Latin American perspective, the goal is for academics to retain control over their own work, not to sustain a for-profit sector. The “transformative agreements” and “transparent pricing” promoted by Plan S reflect the interests of commercial publishers rather than those of the academic community, particularly outside the Global North. Thus, the primary critique of Plan S is accurate: it is a Eurocentric proposal that does not aim to reduce profits or the concentration of power over scholarly publishing held by a few commercial publishers, while leaving the current communication system virtually intact ^{(Aguado-López & Becerril-García, 2019)} .

The differences between cOAlition S and the Latin American scientific community persist despite ongoing dialogue. For instance, in 2019 the event Open Talks marked the first activity with the Plan S representative in the region, and in October 2023, during the Global Summit on Diamond OA in Toluca, Mexico, the same tensions reemerged. In the North, a diamond OA model is adopted without excluding commercial publishers, seeking journals that charge neither APCs nor publication fees and remain under academic ownership. In contrast, the South issued the Manifesto on Science as a Global Public Good: Non-Commercial OA (2023), which frames science as a public good, advocating non-exclusion and non-rivalry, and demanding a fully non-commercial approach. This manifesto critiques the commercial OA model—based on APCs and “transformative” agreements—as a distortion of the original purpose of Open Science, proposing the diamond OA model as a viable solution. As of September 2024, it had been signed by 13,902 institutions and individuals across 81 countries.

One critical issue underlying the debate between commercial and non-commercial models is licensing, which defines conditions of use. Latindex, Redalyc, Clacso, and IBICT issued the Declaración México in support of the Latin American non-commercial OA ecosystem, recommending the CC BY-NC-SA license to safeguard regional academic and scientific production in OA ^{(Latindex et al., 2020)}. This has direct implications for both the immediate use of scientific articles and their derivatives, particularly regarding the appropriation of knowledge funded with public resources. The openness promoted by Plan S and the Global North allows knowledge to be released without restrictions on future appropriation. Consequently, for the sustainability of the diamond model, openness alone is insufficient.

To ensure that science remains a global public good, it is essential to adopt the license proposed by the Declaración México: CC BY-NC-SA. This license prevents appropriation and commercialization, while requiring derivative works to also remain OA without restrictions—except one: the prohibition of private appropriation, thereby ensuring permanent status as a public good. Latin America has pursued this path for over three decades, demonstrating its feasibility and sustainability. Nevertheless, European proposals such as Plan S exacerbate tensions and threaten the regional model.

The purpose of this article has been to show that although still incipient, “transformative” agreements are gaining traction in the region and may have negative consequences—not only due to the financial costs involved but also because they strengthen and legitimize a model directly linked to commercial interests. The evidence shows that the journals included in these agreements: (1) are predominantly from the five largest commercial publishers; (2) are mostly ranked in Q1 and Q2 of the “core”; and (3) although their adoption in Latin America is still limited, they are being led by prestigious universities of recognized quality. This suggests potential long-term, yet highly detrimental, effects for the region, given that the hegemonic evaluation model has already been adopted and these agreements further reinforce its publication directionality. What is new is that the commercial model now seeks legitimacy through openness and the prestige of the “core”.

Knowledge as a public good and human right—if it is to serve as a roadmap, as enshrined in Article 3 of the Mexican Constitution, Section 5, the General Law on Humanities, Sciences, Technologies, and Innovation (LGHCTI, 2023) ^{(Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2023)}, Colombia’s National Open Science Policy 2022-2031 (2022), the various regulations of Argentina and Peru, and the recent Declaration of the Ibero-American University Council (CSUCA), among others—requires a reconfiguration of the publishing ecosystem in several ways:

Conclusions

Although “transformative” agreements did not originate with Plan S, they were institutionalized and promoted globally through it, thereby becoming an “adequate” policy for international expansion. However, in 2023 cOAlition S announced the end of its financial support for “transformative” agreements, as they failed to achieve the intended shift from subscription-based to open access publishing models. Instead, these agreements risk becoming permanent, thereby perpetuating the hybrid OA model that cOAlition S had consistently opposed ^{(cOAlition S, 2023)}.

The evidence presented here shows that “transformative” agreements consolidate the commercial pathway of scholarly publishing by placing knowledge in OA while institutionalizing a pay-to-publish mechanism. In Latin America, these agreements have generally promoted publication within the “mainstream”, alongside a tendency toward commercialization through the licenses specified in each contract. The volume of documents committed to each publisher demonstrates that the agreements reinforce commercial logics, leading scientific publishing toward APC-based and oligopolistic schemes.

Commercialization and the loss of control by the academic and scientific community in the realm of scholarly communication intensify when journals—specialized communication outlets—become evaluation structures instead of communication structures. Science thereby loses its original ethos: sharing in order to improve and solve problems. The strategies and debates reviewed here highlight concerns over inequity and inequality in access to knowledge, yet overlook participation and the evaluation of contributions without addressing the issue of control. While science increasingly moves toward Open Access and Open Science, two fundamental questions remain unresolved and will profoundly shape its trajectory: (1) whether the model should follow commercial or non-commercial logics, and (2) who will retain control over the production, circulation, and legitimation of knowledge.