2026-10-27 –, Naturalis 02
Do you want to know if your institution gets open, reusable metadata — including PIDs like ORCID and ROR — from transformative agreements?
In this session, you’ll discover how we ran a parallel analysis of openly available transformative agreements listed in the ESAC registry to inventorize conditions for open metadata in publisher contracts, in an initiative connected to the Barcelona Declaration/OA2020 and OA Datenpraxis.
You’ll learn about:
- existing gaps in contracts: e.g., permission for full text but not metadata reuse
- missing commitments of PID (ORCID, ROR, Funder ID) use and provision
- how metadata provision differs across consortia: to Crossref, library systems and discovery tools
- real-world data: e.g., ROR are rarely submitted to Crossref
We share our reusable analysis method so you can audit your own contracts, push for stronger open metadata clauses or contribute to this collectively organized analysis for publisher contracts in your country.
Publisher contracts usually contain many specific clauses around open access publishing and full text access. But what is said about (open) metadata in these contracts, and how does this differ across publishers and consortia?
To get a better overview on this, it is useful to systematically collect information on how metadata are currently included in publisher contracts. This information can provide examples of current practice, including differences among how publishers and consortia approach this topic. Looking forward, this can inform future negotiations around open metadata in publisher contracts.
The ESAC Registry of Open Publishing Agreements, maintained by OA2020, provided access to a large corpus of publisher contracts, many of which are available in full text. This allows for a systematic analysis of the extent to which open metadata are currently included in such contracts, and for the resulting data to be publicly shared.
As of December 2025, the ESAC registry contained 635 current contracts (i.e. valid in 2025), of which 230 included a link to the full text of the contract. In total, full text contracts are available for 23 countries (or groups of countries) and 48 publishers.
Initially, we looked at contracts from two library consortia, Jisc (UK) and Bibsam (Sweden) as well as publisher contracts across Germany (DEAL, TIB and SUB Göttingen). Information from these contracts was collected in a systematic way, recording and coding each mention of metadata in a contract. This provides both the full text and provenance of each mention, as well as a way to enable categorizing and comparing mentions across contracts.
Initial observations include:
- large variation in public availability of contracts
- existing gaps in contracts: e.g., permission for full text but not for metadata reuse
- missing commitments of PID (ORCID, ROR, Funder IDs) use and provision
- differences in metadata provision across consortia and publishers: to Crossref, to library systems, to discovery tools
- real-world data showing ROR IDs are rarely submitted to Crossref
The approach and template described here can be useful to bring together public information across publisher contracts, compare and contrast publishers and consortia, and push for stronger open metadata clauses in publisher contracts.
For one country this is a relatively time-constrained task, but across the full ESAC corpus, this quickly becomes a much larger project. We share our reusable analysis method so you can audit your own contracts and potentially contribute to a collectively organized analysis of publisher contracts.
Advisor, research analyst and facilitator at Sesame Open Science
Executive Director, Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information
