Open Access Publishing in Kenya: The challenges and successes of transitioning to Transformative Agreements, and opportunities for these agreements to continue benefiting Kenyan researchers.

The Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium (KLISC) has been at the forefront of championing and spearheading Open Access initiatives in Kenya. The National consortium — which boasts over 130 member institutions through a combination of university libraries, research institutions, and public/national libraries — was established in 2003 with an aim of collective subscriptions to electronic resources to cope with the increasingly unsustainable cost of information resources. All members pay a certain amount of money every year towards the acquisition of electronic journals and eBooks, depending on and guided by their FTE’s. This means that institutions with lower FTE’s get to pay lower amounts compared to those with high FTE’s. At the end, however, all these institutions benefit from equal access to the same resources.