Research-intensive German universities could see their publication costs rise by up to 50?per cent under a new deal with Springer Nature, while smaller, more teaching-focused institutions and public science libraries will see their outlay slashed.

After three years of negotiations, on 22?August the publisher and a consortium of German institutions announced a new agreement that will largely shift the costs of publishing from those who read research papers to those who produce them.

It follows a similar deal between Wiley and Project Deal, Germany¡¯s negotiating consortium, in January. These ¡°transformative deals¡± are heralded as a way to enable open access to research, because if journals no longer rely on reader subscriptions, they do not need paywalls ¨C although critics counter that they leave publishers¡¯ sizeable profit margins untouched.

They are also set to have major implications for different universities¡¯ budgets. At a press conference in Berlin, Gerard Meijer, a member of Project Deal¡¯s negotiating team, said that while the new deal would be ¡°budget neutral¡± for Germany as a whole, ¡°those research institutes that publish a?lot will in the future have to pay more. Those that publish nothing will have to pay nothing.¡±

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¡°It was wrong in the past that the smaller universities that hardly did any research¡­need[ed] to have a library budget to read what others did,¡± he continued.

The deal represented a ¡°paradigm shift¡± in which ¡°small, poor and little universities¡± will no longer subsidise the publication cost of their larger counterparts, said Horst Hippler, the spokesman for Project Deal and former president of the German Rectors¡¯ Conference.

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Under the agreement, German universities will pay €2,750 (?2,486) per article to publish in hybrid journals, which include a mixture of open access and closed, subscription-only articles. For fully open access journals, the price depends on the title.

This figure of €2,750 was calculated to make sure that the overall agreement was ¡°budget neutral¡±, said Professor Meijer, so that German universities would end up paying roughly the same amount to Springer Nature as they did before ¨C although they would get far more for their money, he argued.

¡°The most realistic, pragmatic way to be able to make a transformation from a subscription system to an open access system is saying: let¡¯s do it budget neutral,¡± he said.

The deal allows researchers at German institutions to publish open access in the ¡°vast majority¡± of Springer Nature journals. Currently, 30?per cent of articles are open access, said Daniel Roper, the publisher¡¯s chief executive, but the agreement should boost this to ¡°almost 100?per cent¡±.

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However, the agreement does not cover Nature and other Nature-branded subscription journals, which still have no option to publish open access. ¡°In volume terms, this is only a very, very small percentage [of articles],¡± said Mr Roper.

German academics were still free to publish in these closed journals, said Professor Hippler. ¡°But the point is, it is in the general interest of the scientist that everything he or she publishes can be read by anyone in the world,¡± he said. If an academic chooses not to publish open access, ¡°he has to explain to the taxpayer how and why he chooses these options¡±, he added.

The agreement leaves only Elsevier as the last of three big publishers yet to strike an agreement with Project Deal. ¡°It will be very difficult for other publishers, Elsevier in particular, to neglect that,¡± said Professor Meijer. Researchers might abandon Elsevier for Springer Nature and Wiley if Elsevier remained without a contract, he added.

david.matthews@timeshighereducation.com