The German DEAL contracts

As some people abroad were interested in my earlier posts on the German DEAL contracts, I have decided to summarise here some key points of the new contracts with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier.

The three contracts differ in some aspects, but at least there are two issue they have in common:

• They are opt-in contracts, only those organisations that actively join the contract will benefit from the conditions. This has not been the case with earlier agreements with Wiley and Springer Nature. The participation of one’s own institution is therefore a mandatory prerequisite for the publications of the scientists of one’s own institution to be published Open Access under the new contract conditions.
• The term ranges from 01.01.2024 to 31.12.2028, an exit is only possible in the event of financial hardship. No rule without exception: For the Elsevier contract, it was possible to join from 1 September 2023 onwards.

DEAL agreement with Wiley

The first contract ran from 2019 to 2022 (actually until 2021 but it was automatically extended), followed by a one-year contract, the terms of which differed from the first contract and the one in force from 2024.

The basic conditions of the 2024-2028 contract are:

• There is a defined participation rate of 85% of the publication volume of 2022 in Hybrid and Gold OpenAccess journals, if this rate is not reached by the end of February 2024, Wiley can terminate the contract on 31 December 2024. If the participation rate falls below 85% in subsequent years, Wiley may terminate the contract at any time.
• Not all hybrid articles are priced the same. There are TIERs for Publish and Read (PAR) fees for publications in the hybrid journals:
  Tier 1: €3,150 net, journals that are produced by Wiley or Societies at great expense (e.g. with a salaried editor-in-chief),
  Tier 2: €2,700 net, other Society journals
  Tier 3: €2,200 net, other Wiley journals
• Specific price adjustments are not contractually fixed, but Wiley can demand negotiations on this aspect before contract years 3 and 5. If no agreement is reached, both parties may terminate the contract at the end of the contract year 2 or 4 – this seems a bit artificial as in this case probably only the publisher would be interested in a termination.
• In the contract year 2024, participating organisations will generally pay PAR fees (or fees according to the so-called paper charge model), but at least 60% and no more than 150% of the PAR reference amount. In the contract year 2025, the lower value will fall to 50%, while the upper value will rise to 200%. From the contract year 2026, all participating institutions will pay fees according to the paper charge model. The PAR reference amount corresponds to the institution’s payments due for 2023 for hybrid publications.
• For article processing charges for publications in Gold Open Access journals, there will be discounts of 20 % based on the respective list prices.
• A service fee of €100 net is payable for publications in Hybrid and fully Open Access journals.
• According to the contract (p. 3), the following article types are covered by the terms and conditions: “primary research and review articles, including but not limited to articles considered and organized by Wiley as Case Study, Commentary, Data Article, Education, Lecture, Method and Protocol, Perspective, Practice and Policy, Rapid Publication, Research Article, Review Article, Short Communication, and Technical Note (Wiley is permitted to update this list from time to time”).

For further information, please have a look at the information provided by the project DEAL, the summary above is mainly taken from that website.

DEAL agreement with Springer Nature

The first contract ran from 2020 to 2023 (actually until 2022 but it was automatically extended), the terms of it differed from the one in force from 2024.

The basic conditions of the 2024-2028 contract are:

• A defined participation rate of 70 % has been set. If, by 15 February 2024, not a sufficient number of institutions have joined to account for at least 70% of the publication volume in Springer Nature hybrid journals in 2022, the parties will discuss how to proceed.
• The agreement covers all Springer Nature journals except Nature-branded journals, for which the Nature framework agreement of the Max Planck Digital Library is still running until the end of 2024. It has been agreed with the publisher that negotiations on the integration of the Nature journals into the DEAL contract will be conducted in 2024.
• A Publish and Read (PAR) fee for publications in the hybrid journals is fixed. The PAR fee is €2,600 net. Unlike within the first contract, there will be no PAR fee to be paid for non-research articles (which nevertheless still will be published Open Access).
• Price adjustments: the PAR fee price for the contract years 2027 and 2028 will increase by 1% in each case, provided that the inflation rate in each of these three years is above 3% in the contract years 2024-2026. If this were the case, the PAR fee would be €2,626 in 2027 and €2,652 in 2028.
• In the contract year 2024, participating institutions will generally pay the paper charge (or PAR fee), but at least 75% and no more than 150% of the reference amount. In contract year 2025, the lower value falls to 50%, while the upper value rises to 200%, and in contract year 2026, the lower value is 25% and the upper value is 250%. From the contract year 2027, all participating institutions will pay according to the paper charge model (the aforementioned PAR fees). The reference amount corresponds to the PAR invoice total in 2023 for hybrid publications.
• For article processing charges for publications in Gold Open Access journals, the conditions of the first contract phase were continued: The annual price increases will continue to be capped at 3.5%, with the APC prices of the previous contract being carried forward. In addition, discounts of 20 % – based on the respective DEAL APC list prices – will continue to be agreed upon for a large number of journals (e.g. BMC).
• A service fee of €100 net is payable for publications in hybrid and fully Open Access journals.
• According to the contract (p. 9), the following article types are covered by the terms and conditions: Original Paper, Review, Brief Communication.

For further information, please have a look at the information provided by the project DEAL, the summary above is mainly taken from that website.

DEAL agreement with Elsevier

As the DEAL project was unable to agree on a contract with Elsevier so far, most scientific institutions have not had a contract with Elsevier since 2018 at the latest. The new contract is the first with the nationwide DEAL consortium.

The basic conditions of the 2024-2028 contract are:

• Defined participation rate: The agreement comes into force when a participation rate of authorised institutions institutions that together account for 70% of the German publication volume in 2022 in Elsevier’s core hybrid portfolio and 90% of the volume in Cell Press and The Lancet journals.
• Title portfolio: Some society journals that do not participate in Elsevier’s Core Hybrid programme at the request of the respective societies are therefore excluded from both Open Access publishing and reading rights, including, for example, the journal Blood of the American Society of Hematology.
• The costs for Open Access publishing in Elsevier’s core hybrid journals and for reading access to core hybrid journals including the Cell Press/The Lancet (CPTL) journals are covered by a PAR fee. The amount of the PAR fee is determined based on the participation rate (see above) to the coverage of publications in Elsevier’s core hybrid portfolio as of 15 January 2024 to the following amounts for the duration of the contract:

	Elsevier Core journals (net prices)
	Participation rate < 90%	Participation rate > 90%
2024	€2,550	€2,500
2025	€2,627	€2,575
2026	€2,705	€2,652
2027	€2,786	€2,732
2028	€2,870	€2,814

It is not mentioned what happens if the quota is exactly 90%.

	CPTL journals (net prices)
2024	€6,450
2025	€6.708
2026	€6,976
2027	€7,255
2028	€7,546

• Publications in Elsevier Fully Gold Open Access journals are charged at list price less 20% discount. Publications in Elsevier Fully Gold Cell Press and The Lancet journals are charged at the list price less 15% discount.
• A service fee of €100 net is payable for publications in hybrid and fully Open Access journals.
• According to the contract (p. 31), the following article types are covered by the terms and conditions: Full Length Articles, Review Articles, Case Reports, Data in Brief, Microarticle, Original Software Publication, Protocol, Replication Study, Short Communication, Short Survey, Video Article.

For further information, please have a look at the information provided by the project DEAL, the summary above is mainly taken from that website.

The German DEAL contracts – a comment

The overview primarily serves to summarize the core elements of the three DEAL contracts with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier. Apart from the opt-in model and the term, there are some differences, e.g. in the types of eligible items, the amount of PAR fees, the timing of the transition to real PAR fee funding (Elsevier from 2024, Wiley from 2026, Springer Nature from 2027), the exclusion of some society journals in the case of Elsevier, the use of TIERs at Wiley, fixed price increases. These differences affect the workload for the institutions, mostly libraries, that implement the contracts – and, in my experience, make communication with decision-makers regarding funding and expected funding requirements more cumbersome. Should organisations decide to involve authors in the costs of Hybrid and/or Gold Open Access articles, it is foreseeable that the different regulations will make understanding on the side of the researchers difficult.

Also, one should consider that with the funds saved since 2018 for contracts with Elsevier in Germany, Gold and Diamond Open Access have been massively expanded. This was achieved through the establishment of Open Access Publication Funds (mostly supported by the German Research Foundation, DFG) or consortial Open Access financing, for example, through the initiative Establishing Consortial Open Access Solutions (KOALA).

It cannot be said with certainty that such investments in Open Access funds, which serve all publications and do not favor publications from DEAL agreements, will be curtailed in the future. However, there is at least a risk of reducing competition between Open Access services by prioritizing the financing of DEAL deals over Gold Open Access publishers relying on the mentioned Open Access funds. Since DEAL agreements also include read access in addition to Open Access publication, they have a double benefit, unlike Gold Open Access, which is officially endorsed (unlike hybrid DEAL Open Access), but only finances the publication.

On the other hand, these DEAL agreements force the overdue allocation of Open Access costs in institutional budgets. In the long run, Gold Open Access benefits here, as the costs in the previous DEAL contracts were calculated based on past subscription fees. However, procedures must now be developed to manage publication fees in specific publication budgets, as all payments to these three publishers will be calculated by publication volume no later than 2027.

It also seems somewhat surprising that Germany seems unwavering in its pursuit of transformative Open Access agreements, while elsewhere there is a tendency to move away from these and towards Diamond Open Access.

It remains to be seen how the new DEAL agreement (especially the additional agreement with Elsevier) will affect the publication shares/figures in Hybrid Open Access. Since 2020, there has been a strong increase in Hybrid Open Access, with Wiley and Springer Nature’s shares temporarily exceeding 70%, but then levelling off somewhat:

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
Diamond	1,584	1,690	1,917	2,053	1,997	1,488
Gold	16,140	19,049	25,258	31,698	31,450	23,720
Hybrid	4,525	8,382	21,826	26,837	25,389	22,699
Green (published)	4,232	3,778	3,941	4,241	3,010	969
Green (accepted)	1,915	1,781	1,346	1,159	686	206
Green (submitted)	4,929	5,019	4,171	3,992	3,155	2,363
Bronze	5,555	4,879	3,705	3,020	2,159	1,786
Closed	37,003	34,496	25,758	24,244	21,614	18,638
Hybrid SN Wiley	1,622	4,095	15,870	18,714	16,670	14,630
	36%	49%	73%	70%	66%	64%

The data comes from the Open Access Monitor (OAM), operated by the Forschungszentrum Jülich and initially funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). I used the following parameters:

• Source: Scopus database
• Country: Germany
• Corresponding Authors only
• Open Access colours: Diamond, Gold, Hybrid, Green Published, Green Accepted, Green Submitted, Bronze, Closed. For further information please visit the OAM Wiki.
• Years 2018 to 2023, last update of the data according to Open Access Monitor 29/11/2023

The date of the analysis was December 22, 2023; I mention this because the values have changed to date (December 28, 2023), in some cases (in a few places) in the per mille range.

Please cite as:
Ulrich Herb: The German DEAL contracts, Sci:Debug. December 28, 2023. https://doi.org/10.59350/vfqbq-13430