The OA2020 and ESAC communities mark a new phase in the evolution of the ESAC Registry—a shared, library-driven infrastructure documenting open access publishing agreements between libraries, consortia, and publishers.
Built by practitioners to strengthen transparency and shared insight across a rapidly evolving publishing landscape, the Registry documents how libraries worldwide have translated shared principles into operational practice—embedding open publishing directly into their agreements. Since 2019, more than 1,500 agreements from over 70 countries have been registered, demonstrating how coordinated, library-led action through transformative and open access publishing agreements has driven market evolution, expanding opportunities for authors to publish openly while the removing the financial barriers of author-facing fees.
As these efforts have reshaped expectations across the market—increasing transparency, deepening library leadership, and broadening open access publishing models—the Registry is evolving alongside the progress it documents. The latest enhancements expand its scope and capabilities to support the next phase of coordinated stewardship.
What’s new
The latest updates, developed by the OA2020 Working Group on ESAC Resources Update and Development in consultation with the international library community, introduce several key advancements:
Expanded scope — the Registry now captures all types of open access publishing agreements, including OA-native publishing agreements alongside emerging models.
Improved discovery and benchmarking — enhanced sorting and filtering support deeper analysis of agreements and market trends.
Richer submissions — expanded optional fields enable greater context around agreements, including evolving practices, workflows, OA provision, and author rights.
Together, these enhancements reflect sustained community leadership shaping both the open access landscape and the infrastructure that supports it.
A shared resource built by the community
The ESAC Registry remains freely accessible and open to contributions from any library or consortium with an agreement that includes open access publishing. Even submissions with minimal detail strengthen transparency, support benchmarking, and inform initiatives such as ESAC Market Watch and the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool.
The updates were delivered as the Working Group’s first work package, led by Jack Hyland (IReL), and informed by consultation across the international library, consortium, and publishing communities.
We thank the many colleagues across libraries, consortia, infrastructure providers, and publishing organizations worldwide who contributed feedback and helped validate the enhancements.
As open access continues to evolve, shared infrastructure like the ESAC Registry enables collaboration, accountability, and informed decision-making across the scholarly communication ecosystem.
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