Read-and-publish deals seen as likely route to publisher platforms

Publisher-owned platforms expected to prevail over community efforts, surveys find

The future of scholarly publishing is likely to lie in publisher-run online open-access platforms, with ‘read-and-publish’ deals merely a steppingstone to that future from traditional subscription journals, according to a new report of views in the community.

A spate of such R&P deals—often large-scale agreements between institutional consortia and publishers, covering both access to subscription content and open-access publishing—have been concluded in the past year or so.