DEAL

In recent decades, the journal market has seen an increasing concentration of publishers. Three large publishers in particular now publish around two thirds of all scientific journals. As scientific publications are not interchangeable - libraries cannot subscribe to a cheaper journal instead of an expensive, renowned journal because it does not contain the articles they want - libraries have to accept the conditions dictated to them by the publishers. Libraries have been forming consortia for years to improve their negotiating position, but the scope for negotiation is often very limited.
 

Project DEAL is a new way of entering into negotiations with publishers. Under the auspices of the Alliance of Science Organizations, all academic libraries in Germany have joined forces and, with the agreement of their supporting organizations, have promised the negotiating team that they will do everything necessary to support the negotiations. In particular, the following four points should be achieved:
 

• Eligibility to participate for all scientific institutions in Germany
• Full text access to the publisher's entire portfolio
• Open access publishing for all authors from participating institutions
• Fair publication-based prices

Initially, negotiations were to begin with the publishers Elsevier, SpringerNature and Wiley. In the first year (2016), the negotiating team initially focused on the publisher Elsevier. Unfortunately, the negotiations in 2016 were not successful, so all participating institutions that were not bound by long-term contracts were asked to terminate their contracts with Elsevier as of December 31, 2016. Clausthal University of Technology was also involved, so our accesses were switched off at the beginning of 2017. Shortly afterwards, in February 2016, Elsevier reactivated some journals in the course of further negotiations. However, no agreement could be reached with the publisher Elsevier in 2017 either, with the result that further institutions terminated their contracts with Elsevier at the end of 2017. Elsevier initially kept the accesses open, but when negotiations came to a standstill in summer 2018, Elsevier switched off these accesses. By this time, Sweden had also terminated its contract with Elsevier, so Elsevier also had to be consistent here. Officially, nothing has happened since then.

In 2017, negotiations also began with the publishers SpringerNature and Wiley. A contract was not concluded with these publishers in 2017 either, but as the negotiations were already further advanced than those with Elsevier, a transitional contract was negotiated with these two publishers for 2018 on the same terms as in 2017. This contract was also extended with SpringerNature for 2019, with the intention of negotiating a final contract in 2019.

This was successful with the publisher Wiley. At the beginning of 2019, the successful conclusion of a framework agreement between the DEAL consortium and the publisher Wiley was announced. This agreement was published under the DOI: https://doi.org/10.17617/2.3027595. The desired negotiation points could all be implemented, although the pricing model can only gradually be converted into a publication-based model, as otherwise institutions with high publication volumes would have to cope with excessive price increases. For Clausthal University of Technology, this means, among other things

Access to all Wiley journals at least back to 1997 and this permanently, meaning that access to these volumes will continue even if the contract is not continued after its three-year term. In addition, all authors (first or corresponding authors) may publish their articles under a CC-BY license that are accepted after 1.7.2019 at no additional cost. They do not have to do anything else. The formalities and costs for billing are covered by the library. The publication fund is still available for articles in pure open access journals. A discount of 20% is granted for these articles.

This success should give new impetus to the negotiations with the other two publishers. It is worth fighting for improved conditions, as it will lead to a better supply of literature for everyone in Germany and also to greater visibility for German research and the publications of Clausthal University of Technology. It also helps to implement TU Clausthal's Open Access Policy.

For the further negotiations, I would like to see further support from all sides so that the remaining negotiations can also be successfully concluded. We are not alone in this. In addition to Sweden, Norway has now also terminated its contract with Elsevier and the University of California (one of the larger associations in the USA) has also not extended its contract with Elsevier.

I would like to thank all scientists once again for their patience, because I know that the situation without a contract with Elsevier is making literature research more difficult. I would like to point out once again that the university library is covering the costs of interlibrary loans for Elsevier articles in order to provide a small compensation.

I encourage you all to publish many Open Access articles with Wiley. This will certainly soon have positive effects for science in Germany.

DEAL nationwide licensing by Silke Frank is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.