Described by both parties as a transformative agreement, the agreement is the largest of its kind in North America. This will be a first for Springer Nature in the United States if a formal contract is signed. A Memorandum of Understanding is expected to be released later on Friday. A multi-payer workflow combines institutional funds and research funds directly used by authors at the place of adoption in an efficient and consistent workflow. Of course, there can be compelling exceptions in general by incorporating several sources of funding: brings together the two main sources of funding for the publication (library budgets and research funds); Ensures economic participation in the transaction for both libraries and authors; and allows the library to extend its financial support to authors to a broader portfolio of publisher agreements (including existing subscriptions and native OA publishers). „Springer Nature has been very active in Plan S and is clearly trying to position itself as a leading publishing house for open access,“ hinchliffe said. „What is difficult to know, at what price is Springer Nature able to conclude these agreements?“ The publishing house was more willing to experiment with its business model and adapt to an open access publishing environment than some of its competitors. In a press release, Springer described transformative agreements like these as complex and added, „No customer is equal.“ Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator of literature and information education at the University of Illinois at the University of Urbana-Champaign Library, said the UC agreement was remarkable because Springer Nature „is still able to enter into agreements with consortia and other groups with which Elsevier could not reach an agreement.“ Institutions and consortia around the world that have negotiated transformative agreements form the ESAC (esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/) community, which meets to assess their individual and collective progress. Each of these agreements is tailored to the specific needs of our partners, from reading and publishing services to broader areas such as reproducibility, transparency and research cooperation. Our goal is to test and learn in order to better understand how we can support all the different needs of our customers.