A new open-access publishing deal announced today has finally put to bed a long-running tussle between German science organizations and the publishing giant Elsevier. The agreement will allow German academics to publish open-access, or free-to-read, papers in the publisher’s journals at discounted fees, and give their institutions access to the full range of Elsevier titles at no extra cost.
Compared with the previous subscription-based arrangements, “We get a lot more for lots less money,” says Günter Ziegler, president of the Free University of Berlin and lead negotiator of Project DEAL, a nationwide consortium of universities and science funders that brokered the agreement. “That’s quite an achievement.”
The deal has been a long time coming. Project DEAL was set up in 2014 to negotiate agreements that would allow German-authored papers to be read for free after publication around the world while also giving German institutions full access to a wide range of journals, including paywalled ones. Negotiators hoped such agreements would both increase access and reduce institutions’ costs. The goal was a “publish and read” agreement, in which publishers are paid based solely on the number of articles published and in return provide access to all their journals.
The first target was a deal with Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers. But negotiations proved difficult, and in late 2016 talks stalled. In January 2017, scientists at hundreds of institutions across Germany lost access to the publisher’s journals as institutions let their subscriptions lapse. In 2019, Project DEAL was able to finalize publish and read agreements with other large publishers, first with Wiley and then with Springer Nature. And in 2021, Elsevier reached a similar agreement with the University of California system. But a deal between the German negotiators and Elsevier remained elusive.
Now, the parties have come to an agreement. Institutions that sign on will receive online access to “virtually all” of Elsevier’s more than 2600 publications. (A few publications published in cooperation with scientific societies are not included in the agreement.) At the same time, the institutions will pay open-access publishing fees for each paper where the corresponding author is affiliated with that institution.
For most of Elsevier’s hybrid journals, this charge will be €2550 per article, rising to €6450 for Cell Press and The Lancet journals, with yearly increases of 3% and 4%, respectively. That price is roughly in line with standard prices for The Lancet journals, but is a steep discount for some of the top Cell Press journals, which charge €8120 per article—and €9030 for Cell. The standard fee is also less than the €2750 article fee negotiated with Wiley and Springer Nature. Authors publishing in Elsevier’s fully open-access journals will receive a 20% discount on most article charges (15% for Cell Press and The Lancet family journals).
Based on recent publication figures, Project DEAL estimates that total payments to Elsevier will be between €30 million and €35 million per year, Ziegler says, which is about 40% less than German institutions had been paying for subscriptions and open-access fees in 2016.
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor and librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says that because of Elsevier’s size, the agreement “will further Germany on its intended path” of making the vast majority of its publications open access. She notes that the agreement requires that a minimum of 70% of eligible institutions opt in to the agreement before it takes effect. “That’s an example of the kind of risk sharing we are seeing built into many large-scale transformative agreements,” she says.
