Open and Shut?: Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal

"A Q&A with co-architect of the Big Deal Jan Velterop follows this introduction ...The scholarly communication system has been in serious difficulties for several decades now, a problem generally referred to as the “serials crisis”. The nub of the issue is that the price of scholarly journals has consistently risen faster than the consumer price index. This has seen research libraries increasingly struggle to meet the costs of subscribing to all the journals their researchers need. In the early 1990s, publishers found themselves in a situation where every time they increased the price of a journal they were confronted with a wave of cancellations. In an attempt to recover the lost revenue they would raise the price again, which simply triggered another round of cancellations. Conscious that their livelihood was under threat, publishers cast around for a way to lock subscribers in, eventually coming up with what became known as the 'Big Deal' ..." The Big Deal was pioneered in 1996 by Academic Press (now part of Elsevier), when it signed a three-year licensing contract with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The agreement meant that anyone working in a higher education (HE) institution in the UK got free-at-the-point-of-use access to AP’s entire journal portfolio. Moreover, since it was HEFCE that paid the bill (by means of top slicing), the deal brought the additional benefit of easing the pressure on the budgets of hard-pressed UK research libraries...  After some initial scepticism, other publishers began to offer their own Big Deals, and the model had soon become the default way in which research libraries acquired access to scholarly journals.  However, while AP’s basic concept was copied, most subsequent Big Deals were signed not with national funding bodies but with library consortia. And since the costs were not top sliced, it meant that libraries had to fund their Big Deals from their own budgets.  It soon became evident therefore that the Big Deal had failed to address the fundamental affordability problem that lay at the heart of the serials crisis. And as publishers’ journal portfolios got larger and larger as a result of industry consolidation, the Big Deals began to devour an ever larger portion of a library’s budget. As a consequence, the Big Deal gradually fell into disfavour ..."