After extensive negotiations, the international scientific publisher Elsevier and the DEAL consortium have agreed on a Publish and Read (PAR) contract: The agreement allows researchers at participating institutions to publish Open Access as submitting corresponding authors in over 2,500 Elsevier journals (including Cell Press and The Lancet journals). In return, the institutions pay a PAR fee of €2,550 (€6,450 for Cell Press and The Lancet) per article. In case of a high participation rate, the fee is reduced by 2% to €2,500. Participating institutions also receive a 20% discount on the list APCs of Elsevier Fully Gold Open Access journals and a 15% discount on those of Cell Press and The Lancet. In addition, they receive reading access to almost all of Elsevier's scientific journals (also including titles from Cell Press and The Lancet). The opt-in agreement was signed on September 1st, 2023 and runs until December 31st, 2028.
Unsuccessful negotiation in 2018 and decline in market share
In 2018, the DEAL negotiations with Elsevier failed (open-access.network reported). As a result, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their licence agreements with Elsevier, whereupon the publisher restricted these institutions' access to its journals from July 2018. A study from 2021 shows a decline in Elsevier's market share of articles from DEAL institutions as well as citations of Elsevier articles by DEAL authors from 2018 onwards (open-access.network reported). In 2020, Elsevier was criticised for its focus on fighting so-called shadow libraries instead of concluding Open Access contracts.
An OA agreement has already existed between the scientific publisher Wiley and DEAL since 2019; Springer Nature signed a DEAL agreement in January 2020.
About the DEAL Consortium
The DEAL consortium was launched by the Alliance of German Science Organisations, which represents the vast majority of the most important science and research organisations in Germany. The consortium comprises almost 900 predominantly publicly funded, academic institutions in Germany, such as universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and state and regional libraries. The project aims to implement national licensing agreements for the entire portfolio of e-journals of major academic publishers. For further information, visit: www.deal-konsortium.de
- You can access the press release of the German Rectors' Conference (HRK) via the following link: https://www.hrk.de/press/press-releases/press-release/meldung/the-deal-consortium-and-elsevier-announce-transformative-open-access-agreement-for-germany-5007/
- You can find the Open Access agreement between DEAL and Elsevier here: https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier