Operating your transformative agreement – guidelines
Whether you are already in a transformative agreement with IOP Publishing or are considering one, these guidelines aim to cover the details of how we will operate your agreement.
If you need more detail on any of the points covered, or have additional questions, please contact your Regional Manager or e-mail us at ta@ioppublishing.org and we will be happy to help.
We take care of the identification of authors. You can rest assured that the below eligibility criteria are automatically applied and eligible articles are identified for open access (OA) funding. We will contact corresponding authors to let them know they can publish OA. There are no additional tasks for authors to be able to access your funding.
Our criteria for eligibility
The following are our criteria for determining whether an article will be published under a transformative agreement (TA):
Corresponding author: We use the corresponding author nominated at the point of submission.
Affiliation: This is the affiliation of the corresponding author at the point of submission. The affiliation needs to be an institution within a licence. Where an author has a dual affiliation, we use the primary affiliation provided within the submission system to identify TA eligibility.
Journal: This must be one of the journals in the eligible journals list, depending on the journals included in your licence, which can be viewed on your dedicated support page.
Article type: All chargeable article types are covered; articles, letters and reviews (except for Reports on Progress in PhysicsTM which excludes reviews)
Acceptance date: Eligible articles are those accepted within the licence period.
Article cap: Some of our agreements have article caps in place. These are allocated in order of article acceptance date. We will seek approval for each individual article, with your nominated library contact. See our below section on validation
More about how we operate your transformative agreement:
• TA eligibility is tied to the corresponding author, and we have processes in place to ensure that this remains the same person from submission through to publication.
• TA eligibility is tied to a fixed event: the point of submission. Authors sometimes change their affiliation, but by aligning TA eligibility with this fixed point in time, it helps us to provide continuity in the author experience.
• We use the institution name in the submission form to define whether someone is TA-eligible, rather than any associated documents that are uploaded with the submission.
• We use the institution name to identify eligible articles, which allows authors to use non-institutional email addresses which are commonplace in many parts of the globe.
• Before the TA begins, we use historical submission data to record any variations of institution name being used by authors. This ensures that we capture as many eligible articles as possible.
• We also use fuzzy logic to pick up misspelled institution names to ensure greater coverage of identification services.
See information on author roles and responsibilities here.
You might find it useful to look through our author guide for submitting under a TA here. It is also available in video format.
Capped and unlimited agreements
In unlimited agreements, we save librarians time and administrative effort through our robust article identification, which is extremely reliable with >90% accuracy rates. We take the responsibility to identify articles correctly and inform authors that they can publish OA.
Contact openaccesscharging@ioppublishing.org if you spot anything incorrect.
For capped agreements, we will send timely validation requests to your nominated contact, which are processed as a priority. Consortia can either nominate a contact at each university, or a central contact to receive validation requests on behalf of the members.
Retrospectives
We can offer retrospective OA for eligible articles on the rare occasion that they were missed and were published less than 11 months ago. Our TA Operations team proactively search for missed articles, but you can also tell us if you become aware of a missed article by emailing the DOI or article ID openaccesscharging@ioppublishing.org.
The author must agree and sign a new CC BY copyright licence if the article has been published on a subscription basis. This short video provides more information on copyright within a TA.
In the case where an OA article needs to be retrospectively recognised under a TA, the author/funder would be refunded the article publication charge.
Why do we impose a deadline for retrospective open access?
One of our commitments to OA is that no customer should pay twice. We set our subscription prices based on the levels of OA within each journal, and so we need a deadline upon which to assess that level. After a year the embargo placed on authors for green OA is lifted, making it possible for them to share their accepted manuscript on certain repositories.
For further information, see IOP Publishing’s green open access policy.
Authors opting out
We proactively follow up with librarians in real time when we see authors opting out of OA. This gives the library a chance to follow up with authors if they wish to, to understand their reasons. This can often result in authors changing their mind and publishing OA. Opt outs are very rare, with only 2-3%* of our TA-eligible authors opting out in the last year, and many of these opted back in once librarian contact had been established.
*Based on 2024 data.
This Myth vs Fact sheet aims to address some of the common reasons for authors to opt out.
Copyright
Articles published through TAs are published under a CC BY license. This license allows others to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the author’s work as long the original work is appropriately credited. We created this short video to provide more information to authors. It covers;
• What is a CC BY licence and why is it important?
• What does it mean for me?
• How do I fill out the copyright form?
Reporting
We provide quarterly reporting in excel. Reporting is done at the agreement level and contains all the key metadata for the articles that have been assigned to your TA.
If you are participating in the OA Switchboard’s ‘reporting made easy’ service, you will be able to report on IOP Publishing’s OA articles. OA Switchboard is an independent intermediary which enables academic institutions and research funding organisations to monitor information relating to OA research outputs via a central information hub. You can find out more about joining here.
Signposting your agreement
We signpost your agreement on our Journal Finder tool. This is a free-to-use tool which enables authors to easily check if the journal they would like to publish their work in complies with their funder requirements, or if it is covered by a TA. It aims to streamline the OA publishing workflow and unburden researchers.
We also signpost it on our TA Hub by creating a dedicated page for each country. This allows authors to easily browse and discover agreements.
These signposts are placed throughout our Publishing support pages, within our submission form, in our notifications of funding to authors and within publishing information on our journal homepages. We aim to ensure that authors are well informed of their funding options at all the important stages of their publication journey.
We are compliant with ESAC workflow guidelines provided by the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges Initiative. We recommend that you add details of your agreement to the ESAC database as this in turn feeds through to the Journal Checker tool – another way to help your researchers discover their funding options. esac-initiative.org
Find out more
Further information and resources to help you support and promote your agreement are available here:
TA Hub
Frequently asked questions for authors and librarians
Library resources page
TA Playlist on YouTube