The high relevance of top-notch academic journals turns them into 'must stock' products that assign its often commercial owners with extraordinary market power. Intended to tackle this, university consortia around the globe negotiate so-called 'transformative agreements' with many publishing houses. It shall pave the way towards standard open-access publishing. While several contract designs exist, the 'publish-and-read' (PAR) scheme is the one that comes closest to the ideal of an entirely open access environment: Publishers are paid a fixed case-by-case rate for each publication, which includes a fee for their extensive libraries. In turn, all subscription payments are waived. I theoretically derive that this contract design benefits the included publishers regardless of whether the number of publications in these publishers' journals grows or declines. Consequently, widespread PAR contracts are likely to raise entry barriers for new (open-access) competitors even further. Intending to lower costs for the universities, their libraries, and, ultimately, the taxpayers, this PAR fee contract design of transformative agreements might cause the opposite.

翻译：顶级学术期刊的高度相关性使其成为“必订”产品，这赋予了通常为商业所有的期刊所有者极大的市场支配力。为解决这一问题，全球大学联盟正与多家出版商谈判所谓的“转型协议”，旨在为标准开放获取出版铺平道路。尽管存在多种合同设计，“出版与阅读”（PAR）模式最接近完全开放获取环境的理想：出版商按每篇出版物收取固定的单篇费用，其中包含其庞大图书馆的使用费；相应地，所有订阅费用被免除。我从理论上推导出，无论这些出版商期刊上的出版物数量增长还是下降，这种合同设计都有利于参与的出版商。因此，广泛采用的PAR合同可能会进一步提高新（开放获取）竞争对手的进入壁垒。本意是为大学、其图书馆以及最终为纳税人降低成本的转型协议中这种PAR费用合同设计，反而可能导致相反的结果。