The funding crisis in UK higher education is forcing academic libraries to make difficult financial decisions. Caroline Edwards argues agreements with commercial publishers now represent an unreasonable expense and introduces the Open Journals Collective as an alternative model for scaling open access to journal publications.

Readers of this blog will be aware that the UK higher education sector is in crisis. More than a decade of austerity-driven public sector cuts, a hostile policy towards foreign students and overreliance on international student recruitment, have created a perfect storm.

The Office for Students predicts that nearly three-quarters (72%) of UK universities could be in financial deficit by 2025-26. Universities are already experiencing serious cash flow problems, with as many as 40% only holding enough money in the bank to cover one month of bills including staff salaries. A cursory glance through Queen Mary, University of London’s UCU branch page “UK HE Shrinking” will leave you in no doubt about the scale of sector-wide collapse. Over 10,000 jobs are estimated to be cut via redundancies over the next year, with around 90 UK universities already advertising redundancy programmes to their staff.

The onerous cost of academic publishing

Like other university departments, libraries are being required to find savings quickly. With some library directors being asked to save as much as 25% of their total budget. As they scrutinise their acquisitions, there is one glaringly obvious place to make these savings: journal packages provided by the “big five” commercial publishers: Elsevier / ScienceDirect, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and Sage.

For a research-intensive university with an annual library budget of around £12 million, these packages can cost up to £4.8 million per year, or 40% of the library’s total acquisitions budget. In some cases, it’s higher. Anecdotally, I’ve heard as much as 60% of some institutions’ budget can be spent on “big deal” journal packages alone.

University librarians have been clamouring for years about this issue. Commercial publishing operations like Elsevier, owned by the RELX group, reported profits higher than those generated by Apple, Google, or Amazon. In 2024, RELX’s operating profit was up by 10% to £3.2bn. As Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s largest investment platform, notes this global competitiveness is due “due to its proprietary, hard-to-replicate, data”, much of which is derived from its vast academic journals portfolio.

Is there no alternative?

This corporate stranglehold can feel inevitable. But, as I’m fond of reminding my students, the science fiction author Ursula Le Guin used to say:

 “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Faced with making their staff redundant or cancelling commercial journals packages, university library directors are in open revolt. Three UK universities have already walked away from big deals with Elsevier. Jisc is currently managing negotiations for a renewed deal with commercial publishers on Transformative Agreements, also known as Read & Publish deals. Originally designed to help commercial publishers transition their business away from subscription models towards open access, they are now widely considered to have failed.

These issues are only further compounded by a commercial publishing sector that has become increasingly extractive, particularly in its sale of academic work as training data for AI companies. In May 2024, Informa, the parent company of Taylor & Francis, received $10 million from Microsoft to access academic content for its AI assistant, Copilot; Wiley will receive $44m from AI rights deals, with no opt-out for authors.

According to Jisc’s own review of transitional agreements in the UK published in March 2024, “it would take at least 70 years for the big five publishers to flip their TA titles to OA.” These same deals expired at the end of 2024. By all accounts, negotiations for renewals have stalled, which brings the prospect of a collapse in nationally agreed digital services to university libraries closer. Those of us working in not-for-profit “diamond” open access publishing, such as myself, argue that now is the time to divest entirely.

Open Journals Collective

Today, Monday 31^st March 2025, is therefore a timely moment to be launching the Open Journals Collective (OJC) – an equitable, sustainable, community-led alternative to the big deals offered by corporate academic publishers. Drawing on more than a decade of digital publishing innovation, the OJC confronts the crisis in academic journals publishing with a viable path towards bringing journals publishing back in-house at universities.

We are a growing coalition of academics, librarians, and university-based publishers who have decided to take action. Our Library Board includes library directors, intellectual property specialists, and open research leaders from institutions such as Iowa State University, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, MIT, Yale University, Lancaster University, University of York, Cambridge University, the National Library of Scotland, University of Sussex, and University of St Andrews. Publishers who have already joined the OJC include the Open Library of Humanities, LSE Press, UCL Press, University of Michigan Press, California Digital Library, and Edinburgh Diamond at the University of Edinburgh – and there are more publishers joining soon. We are primarily based in the US, Canada, and UK but are also actively working with colleagues in Europe and beyond.

In January 2026, the OJC will launch a collection of hundreds of journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Discussions are underway whether to offer a collection of science, technology, engineering, and maths journals too. We will fund the costs of publishing these journals diamond open access through a library membership model. This allows journals with precarious income and a high degree of volunteer labour to stabilise their production and become sustainable longer term. From 2027 onwards, in the second year of the programme, we will open applications for mission-aligned publishers to join OJC and receive funding for their diamond open access journals. We’ll also encourage academic editors to “flip” journals away from commercial and subscription models to diamond open access at OJC.

Never let a good crisis go to waste

There is growing scholarly demand for this kind of publishing. Retraction Watch keeps a list of mass editorial resignations from commercially-owned journals. Publishers have pushed editors to the edge, imposing article publishing quotas that subvert editorial autonomy and quality, degrading the platforms that support digital publishing by failing to invest in proper maintenance (which isn’t profitable), and outsourcing editorial support. I know this firsthand as my role leading the Open Library of Humanities involves speaking with angry editorial teams looking to leave commercial publishing companies.

OJC has been received with enthusiasm from libraries and consortia in the UK, US, Europe, and beyond. With early adopters looking to invest in the non-profit programme, it looks set to succeed in replacing commercial Transformative Agreements with an equitable alternative. Diverting funds from library acquisitions budgets into community-owned and not-for-profit publishing, this model can also deliver sizeable savings to universities at a time of crisis. As Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

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Image Credit: Books and Scholars’ Accoutrements 책가도 (冊架圖), late 1800s, Yi Taek-gyun 이택균, Cleveland Museum of Arts (Public Domain).