Big deals and open access – when and for how much? A closer look at costs and timelines from the EUA Big Deals Survey

To increase transparency of the European scholarly publishing landscape, EUA on has conducted two surveys on 'Big Deals' in 2016-17 (Morais et al., 2017) and 2018 (EUA, 2019; EUA, forthcoming). In 2018, the survey gathered information from 31 negotiating consortia and more than 150 contracts for five major publishers (Elsevier, SpringerNature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, American Chemical Society). The preliminary results show that more than one billion euros are spent every year across Europe in electronic resources, of which more than 700 million go to periodicals alone. These numbers are subject to an average annual increase of 3.6%. Notably, universities support about 72% of these costs, putting strains on university budgets in particular in higher education systems with stagnant funding. We will provide data on the timelines of the surveyed contracts, expected cost increases and pricing mechanisms. This allows to develop a possible timeline of transition to ‘transformative agreements’ and associated costs, assuming no or minimal changes in pricing. Open Access (OA) policies such as Plan S (Coalition S, 2019) require a rethinking of these contracts, as the majority do not yet include OA publishing options. Recent contracts, for instance by Projekt DEAL, provide pathways for OA publishing in the framework of big deals. 55% of surveyed contracts include no provisions for either Gold or Green OA. 64% percent of respondents plan to do so in upcoming negotiations. However, bundling in the form of big deals and historic pricing mechanisms are said to limit market competition and causing lock-ins of institutional budgets (European Commission, 2006). Market concentration and workflow lock-in are additional concerns (Posada & Chen, 2018). Negative effects are aggravated for consortia where higher-than-average prices are paid for access to scholarly resources. Cost control or reduction ambitions may be throttled by bundling OA publishing and access using historic pricing