The early exit of three universities from a nationally negotiated deal with Elsevier shows why a broader reset of UK publishing agreements is both necessary and likely to achieve lower prices for institutions, experts have claimed.

In March, Universities UK and the technology group Jisc will begin negotiations with five of the world’s biggest publishers – Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley – aiming to secure what it calls “fair, equitable and sustainable agreements” with the goal of “achieving cost savings” on the £112 million that universities currently spend annually with these five companies.

The push to bring down prices comes after the universities of Sheffield, Surrey and York chose for an additional year, citing financial pressures. Instead, they have signed cheaper individual deals which allow staff to access smaller bundles of the most-used Elsevier titles.

“This is an inevitable consequence of deals being overpriced and universities being unable to afford them,” said Paul Ayris, pro vice-provost (library services) at UCL, who is a member of the UUK-Jisc content negotiation strategy group chaired by Glasgow Caledonian University principal Stephen Decent.

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While universities have made clear their desire for limited price rises in previous negotiations, Ayris insisted the cash-strapped finances of UK universities means the demand for lower prices must be taken seriously. “This is a different time for UK universities – and a dangerous one too,” he said.

“Overseas postgraduate recruitment is not as high as we expected, and tuition fees no longer cover the full cost of undergraduate teaching. With all this there is a realisation that existing deals are expensive but are also not delivering change on open access as quickly as we want.”

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With multi-year deals with all five publishers expiring at the end of 2025, talks will also seek to accelerate open access with UK universities asking for a “non-article-based publishing model” that provides so-called green open access, allowing for accepted manuscripts to be placed in an institutional or subject repository.

But Ayris would like UK universities to go further by bypassing so-called big deals altogether. Instead, universities should invest in digital infrastructure for “diamond journals”, periodicals often run by learned societies in which it is free to publish and articles are free to read. “I see these [financial] threats to universities as an opportunity to invest in new routes to publish which are affordable, sustainable and long term,” he said.

Caren Milloy, director of licensing at Jisc, confirmed the negotiations would be examining ways to support a “different range of publishing models which enable more equitable and sustainable open access research”.

“We want to ensure there is author choice regarding open access but what the sector is trying to achieve is a move away from the article being the primary vehicle for sharing research,” she added.

On constraining publishing costs, the negotiating team will “push hard to achieve the sector’s requirements, knowing we have the support of the sector and universities in the absolute need to reduce costs”, continued Milloy, who added: “The sector is in such a significant financial situation that all institutions are carefully considering how their library portfolio supports their institutions’ priorities across research and teaching and learning and as a result, there are institutions that will need to come out of agreements [at existing prices] as they cannot take them forward.”

For its part, Elsevier said it was “aware of the difficult financial conditions some institutions are under and have worked closely with Jisc to provide relief, and we’ll continue to work with them on a case-by-case basis to support UK institutions”.

Given this backdrop, however, the imperative to reduce big deal costs may trump other concerns, observed Samuel Moore, a scholarly communications specialist at Cambridge University Library.

“While the financial cloud hangs over UK universities, I would imagine that open access is lower down the priority list for university leaders,” said Moore, who, like Ayris, believed investment was needed in diamond presses which “offer a more ethical route to open access publishing”.

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“These initiatives will help bring publishing back under the control of research communities rather than market-driven organisations, so I hope Jisc keeps this goal in mind,” said Moore, who believed more complete green open access could be achieved given “so many universities now have rights retention policies that allow immediate open access without [article processing charge] payment and publishers, for the most part, are untroubled by this.”

For Stevan Harnad, emeritus professor of psychology at University of Southampton, where he led several open access projects, firmer mandates for green open access will be key rather than chasing “fool’s gold open access which is making a fortune for publishers”.

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The cost of diamond presses run on open peer review is “trivial”, argued Harnad, who believed “paying the cost of software for managing submissions and refereeing – the latter furnished by the peers, as always, gratis” – could push APCs as low as £160.

“That is a price that funders and unis could trivially cover from their ‘fool’s gold’ payment savings, and we would have universal open access for all peer-reviewed articles,” he added.

Whether researchers are enthusiastic enough about placing their work in such portals, as opposed to well-known publications in their disciplines, is another matter.

Another important strand of negotiations will be the pushback against ever-increasing numbers of publications with Jisc’s demand to decouple open access from volume-based publishing, believed Moore.

“We’ve seen a concerted strategy by publishers to chase APC money by dramatically increasing the amount of articles they publish and cut back on the amount paid to staff overseeing these processes, all in the name of revenue generation,” he said.

“This has resulted in a system where publishers have essentially lost control of what they’re publishing, resulting in many of the research integrity issues we’ve seen. It’s good that Jisc are asking the big publishers to innovate away from APCs, although it remains to be seen whether they can or will do so,” Moore added.

Yet the greater embrace of lower-cost publishers like MDPI – with whom Jisc recently  covering 62 UK institutions, following Germany’s national deal – might be seen as a signal that the sector is now willing to look beyond the big five publishers towards less starry imprints.

That approach is, however, risky, said Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, who said she was “very worried about MDPI”.

“It goes beyond not having [native] English speakers as editors,” said Bishop, who has identified content which “even a brief glance shows…is total nonsense”.

“There’s long been suspicions that, in order to keep their deadlines, they use poor and possibly fictitious peer reviewers who give highly superficial reviews – often they look like they are AI-generated,” said Bishop on her fears over its editorial processes.

But the evolution of the publishing landscape in the past five years means significant change in publishing deals was possible, she added.

“It’s not just a choice between diamond and gold models,” said Bishop, adding that the “big problem” with Plan S, a similar European-led plan to drive open access, was that it “seemed that they did not regard preprints as equivalent to open access, but people can deposit these for free, and often there’s little change between the preprinted paper and the published one”.

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For those charged with bringing down publisher costs, these technological innovations, allied with a challenging financial landscape, provide hope they can succeed where so many others have failed.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com