NASIG 2026

Illinois State University’s Milner Library has twelve transformative agreements, and as of December 2025 has supported the publication of 200 open access articles, benefiting 426 authors including ISU faculty and students, as well as collaborators from outside institutions. This session will report on findings from surveys and interviews conducted with ISU authors who have made use of these agreements as the corresponding author. We will provide insight into authors’ awareness of library OA agreements, authors’ experience navigating various publishers’ OA platforms and processes, how OA agreements impact author venue selection, author order, and selection of corresponding authors, and whether authors perceive OA agreements to be an endorsement of a publisher. We will also explore how our agreements benefit researchers at other institutions, since 120 co-authors to date have been from outside the university and inter-institutional research groups may select venues and designate the corresponding author to make use of one institution’s agreements. Based on these findings, we will share implications for collection strategy, author communication, and agreement management, tying into the NASIG Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians. While this session will be most applicable to librarians working in scholarly communication and/or collection strategy, all librarians who interact with institutional authors or are interested in transformative agreements may find these insights useful.