Will more universities follow Sheffield, Surrey and York out of big deals with Elsevier? The moment of truth for the sector will come in December 2025.

THE decision by three universities not to extend their Jisc-negotiated transformative agreements (TA) with Elsevier was largely driven by the financial crisis in higher education, but many hope it will be a positive development.

The three-year deal, which provides both content and publishing services, known as read-and-publish deals, ended in December 2024. In October 2024 universities were given the option to extend the deal for a year, which is when Sheffield, Surrey and York made their decisions. So it may not be clear if other universities will follow suit until December 2025.

Context

There are 160 universities in the UK and more than 150 of them signed the Jisc Elsevier deal extension. So, three universities turning it down looks insignificant. Another perspective is that Sheffield and York are both members of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) which has 34 UK members, which still only brings it to about six per cent.

David Prosser, Executive Director of RLUK, said: “In terms of the sheer percentage it’s not hugely significant. What is significant is that people are doing it, and other people will be looking to see what happens. And if the sky doesn’t fall in, that will embolden other institutions, especially in this negotiation year, to take a tougher line.”

Practical impact

In a blog post Peter Barr, Head of (Library) Content and Collections at the University of Sheffield, said: “Undoubtedly, in terms of access to content and ease of OA publishing, it is better to be in a big deal transitional agreement, but that assumes an institution is willing to pay the (often very high) fee.”

He also said that: “Ending a TA creates practical, immediate challenges for the individual researcher in having to change the way they access content, the effect of which cannot be immediately placated by the wider collective changes that a cancellation might bring about.”

The benefits of staying in big deals added to the complications of exiting them have, so far, weighed in favour of staying. But only just. As Peter also points out in his post: “Many libraries had undertaken extensive scenario planning for how to cope without a big deal, should one of the earlier negotiations have failed. There was confidence that these scenarios were workable, but the practicalities within institutions meant it was more pragmatic to sign a bad deal than live without one.”

Tipping the balance

A cocktail of ethical and financial motives for exiting big deals has been swilling around the sector for years, balanced against the practicalities of doing it.

The new financial pressures have tipped this balance for some institutions. David Prosser said: “The practical effect of the financial situation is that some libraries are being asked to cut 10-20 per cent of their content budget. So now they can go to their institutions and say, ‘here is a model and vendors we’ve had concerns about for years – we could save significant amounts of money by moving away from them’.”

David adds: “No library director would make a decision like this without the support from their institution and senior academics and senior decision makers. You don’t take that lightly.”

David Prosser

But the intensity of new financial pressures has “focused minds” at senior levels providing new motivation to take on these practical challenges. He also pointed out that libraries already have relevant workflows in place for other content and these could be scaled up, although there will be different levels of preparedness in different institutions.”

Who will change?

The financial pressure is intense with a number of universities announcing redundancy measures. “I don’t see any short-term change in the financial situation in the sector,” David says. “It’s dire across all universities so this pressure on budgets is going to intensify.”

He adds that: “These big deals are typically the largest items in any library’s content budget. If you are looking to make significant savings you cannot consider the deals to be ¬untouchable and ring-fenced – you have to start thinking about cancelling. People have been thinking about it for years, and this is the catalyst that’s giving them the opportunity to do it.”

While financial pressures motivate change in the academic library sector, are there similar catalysts for change among publishers? Will they lower prices or change their models to accommodate library needs? There are few clear incentives for Elsevier to do this. It may be considering whether to cut prices in order to maintain its UK revenues with a lower profit margin, or to allow revenues to fall and keep the profit margin. But if Elsevier loses UK revenue, it will be more than offset by sales in China and the Middle East.

Culture problem

Another reason why Elsevier doesn’t have to change is that it forecasts growth in the demand for article publication every year. Submissions to Elsevier journals tripled in 10 years to 2022 when 2.6 million were submitted, and 600,000 published.

“It is all to do with research culture and people wanting to publish in prestigious titles,” David said. “I’ve been saying for 20 years that scholarly communications is not about the communications of scholarship. It’s about getting these quality marks against your name.

“A lot has been done to try and decouple the publication venue from the quality mark. Like the Research Excellence Framework saying the quality of the research is important, not where it is published. But many people still believe it’s where you publish that’s important. And as long as that mentality remains, large publishers will have a constant supply of authors.”

Culture solution

“There are increasing numbers of academics who are trying to move away from that system – new journals being formed, editorial boards who have walked away. New diamond open access models.”

He said this shift by academics away from mainstream publishers “is still relatively small scale” but could be ¬accelerated by two factors. First that “an institution that is sacking academic and other staff isn’t going to be overly ¬impressed when Elsevier says, ‘we feel your pain, so it’s just a two per cent increase this year’ ” which could fuel ¬academic dissatisfaction and secondly that a move away from big deals could allow some of these other models to thrive.

A long year

Negotiations for new big deals will start in March ready for offer in December. Before then there may be some friction around other publishers - discussions with the American Chemical Society and IEEE have been difficult. In his blog post Peter Barr said: “The December 2025 watershed sees the end of the majority of the UK’s largest TAs, the economics and dynamics for the next generation of deals has changed. It remains to be seen whether the major ¬academic publishers can respond as the partners they claim to be, or whether we need to look to a new approach entirely.”

An Elsevier spokesperson said: “Through the JISC consortium we have an agreement with over 150 institutions in the UK. We are 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. Through this collaborative process, University of Sheffield, University of York and University of Surrey have all signed individual agreements or are in discussions with us to continue access to Elsevier published journals.”