Germany finally seals ‘milestone’ publishing deal with Elsevier

German institutions can now read and publish in Elsevier journals more cheaply, after terms were painstakingly hammered out by the publishing behemoth and the Project Deal consortium.

The September agreement comes from over a year of talks and means that in 2024 authors at participating German universities will pay €2,550 (£2,180) per article to publish in about 1,800 of Elsevier’s hybrid journals, which will rise by 3 per cent a year, or €6,450 for papers in Cell Press and The Lancet, rising by 4 per cent a year.

Authors at participating institutions can also get a 20 per cent discount in 1,800 titles when paying for “gold” immediate open access, or 15 per cent off in Cell and The Lancet.

Speaking at a 6 September press conference, consortium spokesman and president of the Free University of Berlin, Günter Ziegler, said it had come to the talks “saying we have to get significantly lower” than the previously agreed article processing charge (APC) of €2,750.

Previous Deal-Elsevier talks imploded in 2018, with the consortium’s then-spokesman, Horst Hippler, blaming “excessive demands” from Elsevier and disagreements on pricing and progress towards open access publishing.

The director of the Max Planck Society’s Fritz Haber Institute and the consortium’s deputy spokesman, Gerard Meijer, said a global shift in publishers’ acceptance of open access had helped close the deal.

“We got closer together over the years, and certainly the change of people involved in the negotiations and the focus of the different publishers – Elsevier on open access in particular – has changed,” he said.

In 2019 and 2020 the consortium struck “transformative” read-and-publish deals with Wiley and Springer Nature, both of which expire in 2023.

Unlike that first generation of deals, the five-year Elsevier agreement is opt-in, meaning each German institution can decide whether to take the terms, live without Elsevier, or try to strike its own agreement. Professor Meijer acknowledged that some “felt they had been forced into” the older contracts.

“We have had this five-year gap, so it’s not automatic that the budget is there for joining this contract,” said Professor Ziegler, adding that he hoped institutions would nonetheless be attracted by the hard-won terms.

The national APC is calculated based on Elsevier’s 2022 German publications: just under 10,000 papers across the hybrid journals and around 400 for Cell Press and The Lancet. It assumes authors in Germany will publish at least 70 per cent of the papers they did in 2022, but the 2024 APC drops to €2,500 if they hit 90 per cent of that.

The earnings for Elsevier, which Professor Meijer said would be about €35 million a year and similar to the consortium takings of Wiley and Springer Nature, will be a windfall after five years without a national agreement with Germany.

In a pre-recorded message, Elsevier chief executive officer Kumsal Bayazit, who took over after the last talks collapsed, said the company was “delighted to be serving Germany’s world-leading scientific community again”.

Collective bargaining has somewhat constrained the profits of multinational academic publishers during a shift towards open access, avoiding a total duplication of subscription and publishing fees, but many are lukewarm about the value “big deals” really offer to countries and customers who perform vital peer review for free.

Others have raised concerns that smaller outlets are pushed aside by sector deals with the world’s biggest publishers. The five-year-old Plan S initiative, which has seen major funders require the work they back to be immediately readable to all, has had some success, but most new papers still appear behind paywalls.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com