Your library may have already paid for your next article

Read-and-publish agreements, transformative agreements, publish-and-read deals: different names for the same arrangement. A consortium or a single institution pays a publisher one sum, and in return its researchers can read the publisher's journals and publish open access in them without an article-level invoice. Hundreds of these exist. Most authors covered by one do not know it.

How coverage is decided

The publisher's system decides, usually at acceptance, whether your article qualifies. The inputs are the corresponding author's institutional email domain and the affiliation selected in the submission system. Both need to match a participating institution. A Gmail address on the corresponding author line will produce an invoice for an article that should have been free, and it will do so without warning.

Some agreements also require a library approver to confirm each article. If your library uses that step, the article waits in a queue until someone there clicks. That is normal. A delay is not a rejection.

What is usually covered and what usually is not

Most agreements cover the publisher's hybrid journals. Fully open access journals in the same portfolio may be covered, may be discounted instead, or may be excluded. Flagship titles are often excluded or handled under separate terms. Article types are sometimes limited to research articles and reviews, leaving editorials and letters out.

Many agreements carry an annual cap on articles. When the cap is reached, later articles fall back to the full APC, and caps tend to run out in the last quarter of the year. If your library publishes a remaining-quota counter, look at it. If it does not, ask.

Where to check

Your library's open access page is the first stop. It usually lists the agreements, the covered journals, and who to contact. The ESAC registry lists transformative agreements worldwide, more than a thousand of them, and is the reference when your library's page is out of date. For the journal-level detail, the Journal Checker Tool from cOAlition S can search across every ESAC-registered agreement and show which journals and which institutions each one covers. That detail matters more than the agreement's name suggests: the same publisher's deal can include a specialist title in dozens of agreements and its flagship journal in a handful. The comparison pages show what you would pay under each; per-agreement journal lists are best checked in the Journal Checker Tool for now.

If the publisher's system does not offer the agreement at acceptance and you believe it should, stop. Do not pay and plan to claim it back. Email the library and the journal with the agreement name and your affiliation. The agreement confirmation template is written for exactly this, and it works better before submission than after.

Why this matters beyond your own invoice

Agreements are negotiated on the assumption that authors will use them. Every article that falls through to an invoice because of a personal email address is an article the institution paid for twice, and that shows up at the next negotiation as evidence the deal is underused. Using the agreement correctly is not only cheaper for you. It is how the agreement survives.