Dataset: Tracking transformative agreements through open metadata: method and validation using Dutch Research Council NWO funded papers

Data and code belonging to the manuscript:  

Tracking transformative agreements through open metadata: method and validation using Dutch Research Council NWO funded papers 

Abstract

Transformative agreements have become an important strategy in the transition to open access, with almost 1,200 such agreements registered by 2025. Despite their prevalence, these agreements suffer from important transparency limitations, most notably article-level metadata indicating which articles are covered by these agreements. Typically, this data is available to libraries but not openly shared, making it difficult to study the impact of these agreements. In this paper, we present a novel, open, replicable method for analyzing transformative agreements using open metadata, specifically the Journal Checker tool provided by cOAlition S and OpenAlex. To demonstrate its potential, we apply our approach to a subset of publications funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and its health research counterpart ZonMw. In addition, the results of this open method are compared with the actual publisher data reported to the Dutch university library consortium UKB. This validation shows that this open method accurately identified 89% of the publications covered by transformative agreements, while the 11% false positives shed an interesting light on the limitations of this method. In the absence of hard, openly available article-level data on transformative agreements, we provide researchers and institutions with a powerful tool to critically track and evaluate the impact of these agreements.

This dataset contains the following files:

Dataset.csv - Data set of unique DOIs (n = 6,610) enriched with data from Crossref, Unpaywall, OpenAlex and the Journal Checker Tool. 

Data dictionary.csv - description of the data in the dataset, its type and sources.  

Google_Apps_Script.js - Google Apps Script for retrieving information from the Journal Checker Tool API.

Data comparison.csv - Data set of DOI's (n= 10,126) retrieved from the UKBsis datahub and used to establish the overlap with the original dataset.

Data dictionary data comparison.csv - description of the data in the data comparison data set, its type and sources.