Report: “As Elsevier Falters, Wiley Succeeds in Open-Access Deal Making”

From The Scientist:

Over the last few years, Project DEAL, a consortium that represents around 700 academic institutions in Germany, has been in negotiations for nationwide licensing agreements with three of the largest scholarly publishers—Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley. Most of the news surrounding the effort has focused on disputes with Elsevier, which have led to lapses in subscriptions and lost access to the publisher’s journals. But the tune changed in January when DEAL announced its first triumph: a deal with Wiley.

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“It certainly doesn’t surprise me that Elsevier’s disappearance in Germany would lead another major publisher to try to find a way to position itself there differently,” says Roger Schonfeld, the director of Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums for Ithaka S+R, a consulting group in New York focused on higher education. “Does that mean that the deal that Wiley struck with Germany is one that it would be able to strike in every other country or every other university around the world? That’s a different story.”

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DEAL is not the only group that has had better dealings with Wiley than Elsevier. Over the last few months, consortia of research institutions in Hungary and Norway have announced successful deals with Wiley while, around the same time, stating that they were letting their Elsevier contracts lapse due to stagnant negotiations.

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The latest agreements with various publishers are part of a broader push for open access across Europe. Consortia in several countries, including the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK, are also angling for open-access publishing deals.

Read the Complete Article (approx. 1400 words)

Background

Germany: “Meaning and Opportunities of the DEAL-Wiley Contract for the Open-Access Transformation” (March 18, 2019)

Wiley Norwegian Directorate for ICT and Joint Services in Higher Education and Research Partner (UNIT) Announce Three-Year Open Access and Subscription Agreement (March 15, 2019)

Wiley Signs Open Access and Subscription Agreement with Hungarian Electronic Information Service National Programme (EISZ) (March 4, 2019)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Elsevier, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing, Springer Nature