The Knowledge Exchange (KE) Monitoring Open Access (OA) task and finish group has undertaken research on agreements with OA elements (e.g. agreements with APC discounts, offsetting agreements, read and publish agreements) set between consortia from KE countries and major publishers between 2016 and early 2019. Following recommendations from KE and ESAC It assessed agreements with OA elements to investigate what article-level metadata consortia request from publishers and what metadata publishers deliver to consortia.

With Plan S research funders requiring a full transition to OA by 2021, the delivery of article-level metadata becomes critical to monitor publishers’ compliance with Plan S requirements for transformative arrangements.

 The research findings showed that:

• Not all consortia agreements requested the article-level metadata as recommended by KE and ESAC.
• Most importantly, none of the publishers provided all the metadata that the consortia requested.
• Publishers also did not deliver the same metadata across countries and this may be due lack of consistency in their practices.

The research findings can be used as a benchmark to monitor how major publishers were performing in KE countries until early 2019 and prior to Plan S comes into effect in 2021.

You can read the full article here, a blog article here: and find out more about Knowledge Exchange's work on Monitoring Open Access here.