After recent reporting that three UK universities had ended their transitional open access agreements with the publisher Elsevier, Peter Barr explains why academic libraries are making these decisions and what it says about the wider academic publishing sector in the UK.
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For those wondering why three universities (including my own) have decided not to continue with their Elsevier Read-and-Publish Deals, the explanation is both simple and complicated.
It has undoubtedly been triggered by the financial difficulty that UK higher education finds itself in, but it is also indicative of unresolved issues in academic publishing. It comes against a backdrop where Transitional agreements (TAs) with commercial publishers have been found to be unsustainable and the sector is looking to negotiate the next generation of open access agreements. It is also about the structure of library content budgets, the different ways libraries serve their research communities, and the parts of library administration that those research communities (and their trade publications) choose to take interest in. We have outlined our approach at Sheffield, but it is worth considering the implications of this move more widely.
The conclusion of Jisc’s ‘A review of transitional agreements in the UK’ is that the transition to Open Access (OA) has stalled, and that there are serious concerns about the ongoing sustainability of these agreements in their current form. This is why Jisc is seeking to move away from the read and publish format, where the cost of publishing is tied to charges by individual articles, in its ‘next generation’ negotiations. All of the ‘Big 5’ TAs (Wiley, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage and the extended Elsevier deal) expire at the end of this year creating a potential watershed moment.
It has undoubtedly been triggered by the financial difficulty that UK higher education finds itself in, but it is also indicative of unresolved issues in academic publishing.
In many ways the Jisc report confirms what was widely known within libraries, and was demonstrated by the lukewarm acceptance of the Springer Nature deal. Many libraries had undertaken extensive scenario planning for how to cope without a big deal, should one of the earlier negotiations have failed. There was confidence that these scenarios were workable, but the practicalities within institutions meant it was more pragmatic to sign a bad deal than live without one. So, the question is, why are some universities leaving the Elsevier deal now, and what is the significance?
Having seen a sector-wide drop in income, universities are looking to reduce their institutional spend, and library budgets form part of that. Therefore, library managers are faced with difficult choices. Considering that the vast majority of library content budgets are some form of subscription or recurrent spend, this means losing access to content and services that were previously held. The balance of this spending is weighted heavily towards journals and research content taking up funds that could be used to better support teaching and learning.
At Sheffield, the big deals accounted for 30% of our 23/24 content budget, with 12% of our total spend used for the Elsevier agreement alone. In light of the division of existing library content budgets, it is difficult to make significant savings by merely restricting book spend or by cancelling individual small subscriptions. The unsustainability of TAs is heightened by their reliance on the UKRI block grant. According to the Jisc report (p.13), “institutions used up to £9.4m of UKRI block grant funding towards the costs of TAs in 2022 – nearly a tenth of modelled costs for TAs that year. By 2024, this is predicted to increase to 25%”. So, on top of savings dictated by the institution, libraries are likely to need to replace this subsidy. In this context, when effective ‘no deal’ scenario planning has already been done, it is natural that TAs will come under scrutiny.
The unsustainability of TAs is heightened by their reliance on the UKRI block grant.
It is helpful to understand the technicalities of how such a decision is made, particularly as some try to speculate which institutions might follow suit. UK institutions were offered a one year extension to the existing three year Elsevier Read and Publish deal. The decision to continue, or not, needed to be communicated to Jisc and Elsevier in October 2024. This means that any institution that is leaving the deal for 2025 will have already made the decision, and, it is assumed, communicated this to their users.
At Sheffield our decision was not a secret before it was picked up by Research Professional. It is also worth noting that many academic libraries have had to make significant budget savings in recent years including pulling out of, or being unable to sign up to, TAs, without it troubling the trade press. From a librarian’s point of view, it would be nice if the restrictive practices, above inflation price increases, the wild west of the e-textbook market and the monetisation of research data for AI could generate the same kind of interest. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that we will see further planned departures from the Elsevier deal this year.
If multiple libraries are unable, or unwilling, to sign up to a deal then either the remaining subscribers will have to pay more to maintain the revenue, or the publisher will have to accept they will make less.
This is about value for money. Undoubtedly, in terms of access to content and ease of OA publishing, it is better to be in a big deal transitional agreement, but that assumes an institution is willing to pay the (often very high) fee. However, pragmatically, what an institution requires is enough access to relevant content when needed, and for its research outputs to be made OA in line with REF and funder policies. A TA is not necessarily required to achieve this. Access can be provided through a combination of limited resubscription, post-cancellation access, existing OA content, and document delivery systems. Publishing can be achieved with the assertion of a Rights Retention Statement, and the strategic payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) in compliant journals. If these strategies prove sufficient (and they have elsewhere) then it changes the dynamics of the deal publishers need to offer institutions.
The major academic publishers are revenue driven, and they have become used to a certain level of income from the UK market. Their strategies are largely based on growth, which they have been able to push into deals by encouraging the publishing of more and more articles. If multiple libraries are unable, or unwilling, to sign up to a deal then either the remaining subscribers will have to pay more to maintain the revenue, or the publisher will have to accept they will make less. Do publishers have the ability to adapt? Reduced revenue must lead to a different product offering than a bundle deal bolted on to a pot of APCs. It may lead to the untethering of read from publish again in pursuit of an affordable offer. The actual amount of money required to make the system work is debatable, but this could be resolved if academic publishers could commit to true price transparency. Nevertheless, a system that has less money in it will need to become more efficient, and clearly the profits of the major commercial publishers and pointless proliferation of outputs, tagged as growth, is an increasingly intolerable waste in this system.
in the spirit of not wasting a crisis, this represents an opportunity to reset the power imbalance between libraries (and their institutions), and publishers.
Fundamentally, this is about what sort of system of scholarly communication the research community (funders, institutions, individual researchers) wishes to be part of. Ending a TA creates practical, immediate challenges for the individual researcher in having to change the way they access content, the effect of which cannot be immediately placated by the wider collective changes that a cancellation might bring about.
However, in the spirit of not wasting a crisis, this represents an opportunity to reset the power imbalance between libraries (and their institutions), and publishers. The coming year will tell us a lot more about how far all this can be taken, but this is not just an issue for libraries. Institutions and policy makers must decide what sort of academic publishing they wish to support. Publishers must decide whether they can become affordable again. This has surfaced longstanding issues that libraries kept in check. The December 2025 watershed sees the end of the majority of the UK’s largest TAs, the economics and dynamics for the next generation of deals has changed. It remains to be seen whether the major academic publishers can respond as the partners they claim to be, or whether we need to look to a new approach entirely.
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It is about time that librarians and funders came to the conclusion that the conventional legacy, and now OA for-profit, publishing model has to change. The OA model has fostered a huge growth in publication volume of works of variable quality and this has also spawned a for-profit, volume-drive and quality- and integrity-negating sector. Even legacy publishers have taken on this model. This requires a serious consolidation of the otherwise fragmented purchasing sector to negotiate better deals, as well as promoting models such as community- or association-owned alternatives and the increase of the green OA model where published papers can be available via repositories. The funders need to be a whole lot more savvy about the game that the commercial publishers are playing and rein it in, to contain costs and promote quality and integrity, which are at increasing risk.
What an excellent piece. When I started in journal publishing in August 1968 anxious about my future as I was getting married the following month I was told by a senior colleague that I should try something else. Journal publishing had no future, libraries cannot afford the price increases and peer review will collapse through lack of reviewers.
We did indeed progress from crisis to crisis and pricing issues remain resolved but thanks to developments in technology and the central role of scholarly communication is stronger than ever. It has depended on the library community whatever its feelings being prepared to work out a way with publishers and societies. Examples include the emergence of the big deal in 1994 organised and funded by JISC with some shoving from Bahram Bekhradnia and more recently the pay to read and publish model supported by the combined effort of German libraries.
I think we really need to start opening Diamond Open Access journals en mass as a community. No fees for either reading or publishing. Academics already write, review and edit the papers. Employing a couple of copy-editors and some admin staff seem pretty cheap in comparison.
But as academics we’re too focused on chasing largely arbitrary numbers (actually , I think most see through this silly game). And out “leaders” have created systems which tie promotion not to the work you actually do, but to your h-index or the IF of the last journal you published in
This is well said. The OA/TAs has completely become for profit and prestige. This has lingered for so long and now is the time to rethink cost and reason for publishing.
A typical Africa scenario (of OA or TA) is like a case of puring all your fortune into the deep sea believing it will be sighted once it can fill the ocean.
Sometimes OA paid by an average Africa Professor (Single Author) is more than his total amount due for retirement.
We need to rethink this trend.