Projekt DEAL

Summary

Projekt DEAL was created by the Alliance of German Science Organizations, which brings together nearly 700 academic institutions in Germany, representing the vast majority of the country’s leading scientific and research organizations.

Within the framework of the project, these organizations negotiate nationwide transformative agreements for licenses covering the full portfolio of electronic journals from major academic publishers.

So far, Projekt DEAL has signed contracts with Wiley (2019–2022), Springer Nature (2020–2022), and Elsevier (2023–2028).

Promoting organizations

The DEAL project is driven by the Alliance of German Science Organizations (Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen), which brings together the country’s leading research and higher education institutions. Among them are the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Max Planck Society, the Helmholtz Association, the Leibniz Association, and the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), which is mandated to conduct negotiations with publishers on behalf of all German academic institutions.

Objectives

The DEAL project seeks to structurally transform access to and the publication of scientific research in Germany through national agreements with major academic publishers. Its main objectives are:

Immediate open access publication of all new research articles written by authors affiliated with German institutions.
Complete, permanent, and sustainable access to the full text of the publishers’ journal portfolios included in the agreements.
Fair and reasonable prices for the provision of publishing services, based on a simple, transparent, and future-oriented model linked to the number of articles published.
Promoting the transition to open access by ensuring that researchers do not have to bear individual publication costs.
Achieving transformative “Publish & Read” models that replace traditional subscriptions and combine in a single fee both reading rights and publication costs.
Strengthening the negotiating position of German institutions with major publishers through collective action at the national level.
Contributing to an international cultural shift, aligned with the Open Access 2020 initiative, the LIBER principles for negotiations with publishers, and the principles of Plan S, fostering more open, interoperable, and sustainable scholarly communication practices.

Beneficiaries and stakeholders

All German research institutions entitled to participate in the Alliance and in the national licenses funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) can join the agreements. These include comprehensive universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions, and state and regional libraries. Hospitals, with the exception of university hospitals, and private companies of any kind are not eligible to participate.

These agreements benefit researchers worldwide, as they enable greater visibility, impact, efficiency, transparency, and sustainability in the dissemination of German research results.

In addition, through these agreements with academic publishers:

All authors have the right to publish their research articles immediately in open access without having to pay the corresponding publication fees.
Researchers and students at German institutions, both large and small, have indefinite access to complete catalogs of academic journals.
Librarians have a viable and sustainable framework to redesign their workflows and budgets in order to meet the expectations of researchers and students in the digital age.
Administrators can control and rationalize investments while raising the profile and research capacity of their institutions.

Results

On January 15, 2019, Projekt DEAL signed an agreement with Wiley, enabling nearly 10,000 research articles by German authors to be published immediately in open access.

Wiley and Projekt DEAL jointly launched three major initiatives as a result of this cooperation:

A new interdisciplinary flagship open access journal to publish work from the global research community, serving as a unique forum for developing new models of open access publishing.
A service development group for authors, aimed at innovating and accelerating new publishing models.
A new annual symposium for early-career German researchers to highlight innovative ideas about the future of scholarly communication.

On January 8, 2020, Projekt DEAL signed a transformative agreement with Springer Nature for open access publishing. At the time of signing, this agreement was considered the world’s largest transformative open access agreement.

It covers more than 13,000 scholarly articles by authors affiliated with German institutions accepted for publication in Springer Nature journals.

The agreement also allows open access publication in approximately 2,340 of the publisher’s journals and provides participating institutions with broad access to Springer Nature’s journal portfolio.

Through this agreement, authors affiliated with more than 700 German academic and research institutions that are part of Projekt DEAL can publish their accepted manuscripts in open access immediately, both in the publisher’s “hybrid” journals and in its fully open access journals.

This agreement with Springer Nature lays the groundwork for authors and research institutions to make open access the standard for scholarly communication, while marking significant progress in the transition to open access.

Negotiating at the national level with the largest academic publishers generates greater potential for a positive impact across Germany’s entire research system.

Challenges

The main challenge identified from the agreements with publishers lies in the degree of complexity and scale of their implementation.

Another challenge encountered in the follow-up to the first transformative agreement with Wiley was the need for institutions to assume financial responsibility for the open access publishing services used by their researchers, since their former subscription budgets did not align with the new costs. To ease the transition, a collective funding strategy was designed by DEAL Operations.

Evidence of success

In September 2020, a report was published on the progress achieved under Projekt DEAL’s first transformative agreement. Specifically, it showed:

More than 4,400 research articles had been accepted for publication in Wiley’s subscription journals.
By the end of 2019, author uptake of open access publishing under DEAL had reached 90%.
Authors from German institutions published over 500 articles in Wiley’s fully open access journals in 2019.
The overall cost of scholarly publishing was reduced.
Since early 2019, researchers, students, faculty, physicians, and specialists at more than 450 institutions in Germany had gained permanent access to Wiley’s more than 1,600 scientific journals.
This widespread access led to an increase of more than 40% in article downloads.
The agreement demonstrated that it was possible to provide more services to more institutions for the same level of investment.
In the first year of the agreement, 98% of research articles published by German researchers in Wiley journals came from registered institutions.
Two-thirds of the registered institutions saw a reduction in costs compared to their previous subscription expenditures.

The nationwide viability of the project established a solid foundation for stakeholder discussions on flexibility and new budget strategies for a future open access publishing system.

At the same time, the project’s negotiations serve as a model that can be replicated and scaled up by other institutions and negotiating consortia, under the umbrella of the Alliance of German Science Organizations, with other publishers.