A DEAL for open access: The negotiations between the German DEAL project and publishers have global implications for academic publishing beyond just Germany: EMBO reports: Vol 19, No 6
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2020-05-14
Summary:
"Impatience over the slow progress has been particularly strong in Germany, where universities and funding institutions have been at the vanguard of the OA movement. It eventually led to the DEAL project (https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/) set up in 2014 by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany and led by the country's Rectors’ Conference (HRK). A key objective was to establish national licensing agreements for the entire electronic portfolio from the large academic publishers. In addition, DEAL aims to further advance OA; one of its goals is to make all publications from corresponding authors of eligible institutions in Germany open access immediately upon publication, that being the publish part of its strategy. By the same token, DEAL institutions should have full access to the complete e‐journal portfolio of the publisher—the read part of DEAL. Equally important, DEAL wants to establish fair article‐processing fees to cover publication costs.
DEAL began negotiating with Elsevier late in 2016, followed by Springer Nature and Wiley in 2017. Negotiations proceeded relatively smoothly with Springer Nature and Wiley, according to DEAL. Both publishers accepted that the journals market was undergoing radical transformation and agreed to continue existing agreements on an interim basis with prices frozen in order to allow negotiations to conclude. A new DEAL licence is now expected to start during 2018.
However, agreement has not been reached yet with Elsevier, the biggest of the three, whose offers have so far failed to match the project's goals, according to DEAL. For example, Elsevier would only offer green open access—that is, self‐archiving in an open repository—in accordance with its own rules, which would mean that scientists would not have open access to the final, published version of their papers. Above all, Elsevier wants to keep the publish and read components separate, whereas a non‐negotiable red line for DEAL was to integrate them in a single model, because they are entwined and determine overall access rights and costs....
There is an important aspect of DEAL not explicitly stated, which is that, although focused on Germany, it is global in ambition and scope...."