Combining Big Deals with open access publishing quotas erects new barriers across the pathway to open access. Instead, researchers, academic libraries, research institutions, and their funders should choose publishing models that are in line with their overarching goals and missions.
A recent comprehensive review of transitional agreements in the United Kingdom revealed that for the biggest scientific publishers, “flipping” subscription-based journals to an open access (OA) model would take at least 70 years (Brayman et al., 2024). Despite such findings, ever bigger chunks of library budgets continue to be locked into these deals (also called “transformative” or “read-and-publish” agreements). Even worse, libraries—along with researchers, research funders, administrators, and policy-makers—have become complicit in propagating an OA approach that is highly inequitable and counterproductive to bibliodiversity and which does not deliver on the promised full-fledged OA transition. Recent research focusing on the Dutch approach through the lens of infrastructure studies suggests some reasons why.
Since the term “open access” was coined at the beginning of this millennium by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), researchers, librarians, academic institutions, and policymakers have broadly supported the aim of making attainable “the transition from the present methods of dissemination [of scholarly literature] to open access” (BOAI, 2002; see also Šimukovič, 2020). Numerous national and international transition plans have been drawn up, setting the pace with target years by which “100% OA” in scholarly publishing should be reached. For example, the Swiss National Strategy on Open Access envisioned that “by 2024, all scholarly publication activity in Switzerland should be OA, all scholarly publications funded by public money must be freely accessible on the internet” (swissuniversities & Swiss National Science Foundation, 2017, p. 3). In 2016, the Council of the European Union announced its support for “a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020” (Council of the European Union, 2016, p. 8). And “Plan S” initially threatened sanctions for grantees of participating funding agencies that hadn’t published their works in OA-only by January 2020 (cOAlition S, 2018).
These targets were all missed.
What is common to many such strategies is their reliance on negotiating so-called “transformative” agreements with major publishing companies that combine subscription bundles or Big Deals with dedicated OA publishing components (see e.g. Earney, 2017; Morais et al., 2018). Higher education institutions and other organizations increasingly admit that such agreements fail to reduce systemic dependencies on a small number of large commercial publishing companies and are counterproductive to bibliodiversity, as they channel limited available resources exclusively to the same handful of publishers (Brayman et al., 2024; Mudditt, 2024). Analyses from previous years further warn against getting stuck in a permanent transition (SUHF, 2023; Kiley, 2024; see also Šimukovič, 2023a). Even in the Netherlands, a country that was seen as a frontrunner in this area—along with the UK, where the (in)famous Finch report recommended prioritizing full OA or so-called “hybrid” journals that request Article Processing Charges (APCs) “as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded” (Finch Group, 2012, p. 7)—calls to broaden the OA agenda became louder after a critical interim assessment of its transition measures (Bosman et al., 2021).
But instead of nurturing noncommercial repositories and other non-APC publishing models, consortia of libraries and research institutions worldwide continue to sign costly contracts that merge journal subscription bundles with OA publishing fees (see, e.g., the recent French Couperin’s agreement that is “worth €33 million per year”). Or, to take the Swiss example once again: “continued negotiations with service providers” to conclude such agreements are repeatedly positioned as a central pathway for realizing national OA objectives (swissuniversities & Swiss National Science Foundation, 2024, p. 16).
Why is that the case?
In my doctoral dissertation, I analyzed one of the early examples from the Netherlands in which conventional Big Deals were extended with OA publishing quotas (Šimukovič, 2023a, 2023b). Following the ambitious plan of Dutch state secretary Sander Dekker to reach 100% OA in ten years, or by 2024, the Association of Cooperating Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU, now called Universities of the Netherlands) took the lead in respective negotiations with the eight biggest publishers. The negotiations with the publishing and analytics company Elsevier attracted particular attention from observers, as breaking the powerful position of this giant was expected to level the playing field for all others. The “Dutch approach”—with self-declared success factors such as forming “a powerful delegation” that is responsible for taking the OA negotiations “to the highest administrative level” (VSNU, 2016, p. 13), away from academic libraries and their consortia—was highly influential and adopted in many subsequent negotiations in the Netherlands and beyond.
The Dutch national OA transition strategy firmly positioned the hybrid OA model as its preferred implementation model and required that research organizations and major publishers renegotiate the upcoming journal subscription packages “to offset article publishing charges with licensing fees” (OCW, 2014, n.p.; Šimukovič, 2023a).
From a theoretical perspective, I compared this novel wave of multi-annual Big Deals with OA publishing components to enforcing what the sociologist Michel Callon has termed an “Obligatory Passage Point” (see Figure 1).
Callon (1986) introduces the concept of an obligatory passage point (OPP) in his sociology of translation, using principles from the Actor-Network Theory (ANT, see e.g., Actor-network theory, 2024). Per Callon, to establish a mutual understanding of a certain problem and its corresponding solution (or to build a network, in ANT terms), involved actors need to agree on an OPP—that is, a narrowly defined problem-solution proposition that forces the actors to converge on a certain pathway and discourages efforts to search for alternative solutions. In the case of Dutch OA negotiations, the actors involved had to be convinced to forge alliances and take necessary steps in order to pursue the trajectory envisioned by the state secretary. The message conveyed by science policymakers in the Netherlands was unmistakable: only if all parties agreed with the proposed problem-solution definition and started to act immediately would the switch to a full OA system be achieved in due time (Šimukovič, 2023a). This interpretation was repeatedly echoed in my interviews with negotiation team members, whereas the prescriptions made by the state secretary Dekker on combining Big Deals with some OA arrangements were considered “a given fact” for implementing the national OA transition.
The Dutch example reveals how ambivalences and ironies get lost when, in their efforts to advance open and unrestricted access to scholarly literature, academic libraries and research institutions are pressured into focusing on read-and-publish agreements. This becomes particularly clear through the conceptual lens of infrastructure studies. As Susan Leigh Star (1999), one of the main figures in this field, explains, it is quite easy to understand an infrastructure when thinking of some common examples such as railroad lines, pipes, and power plants, which are basically invisible to their users and ready to hand (at least when they work well) and which support many other kinds of work. Building and/or maintaining an infrastructure typically requires close alignment with conventions of practice and embodiment of standards, but we only learn about the mechanics in the background when something breaks down.
Departing from these fundamental ideas, academic publishing can be conceptualized as a socio-technical infrastructure that, as a system of substrates (in Star’s terms), enables not only the communication of research findings, or the substance, but is also an integral part of evaluation procedures that are necessary for establishing individual reputational profiles and academic career progression (Šimukovič, 2023a, 2023b). Importantly, a well-functioning academic publishing infrastructure requires a great deal of invisible labor by librarians as infrastructural workers. A prime example is the implementation of read-and-publish agreements in the context of which librarians check affiliations of corresponding authors after they submit a new manuscript for publication, navigate dashboards built for this purpose by major publishers, collect related financial statistics, contribute them to (inter-)national OA monitoring initiatives, examine individual requests to use institutional OA funds to pay for publishing fees or APCs, and so forth. Setting up such operational procedures basically continued established business relations which were already largely familiar from the regular Big Deals. This also explains why read-and-publish agreements were adopted so quickly by academic libraries: these new agreements easily linked up with conventions of practice and built on a base that was already in place.
The related concept of “re-infrastructuring” (Grisot & Vassilakopoulou, 2017) helps explain the particular challenges faced by the OA negotiators in charge of implementing the OA transition in the Netherlands. In the case of the VSNU-Elsevier negotiations, the negotiators’ task was to “turn” the mature infrastructure of the subscription-based publishing of academic journals to the new logic of OA. For this reason, negotiation teams on both sides had to balance novel with old elements when prolonging their regular Big Deals and avoid causing harm to preexisting arrangements already in place (and thus a potential no-deal situation). As a result, the negotiation teams had to deal with partially conflicting goals and maintain the “embeddedness” between individual elements that implicitly became a guiding principle that shaped all negotiation steps and, subsequently, the negotiation strategies in other countries (Šimukovič, 2023a).
Thinking of the academic publishing system as another example of an infrastructure helps explain the systemic inertia and resistance from authors, readers, decision-makers, and other actors when it comes to changing established workflows and potentially losing privileged positions. At the same time, by propelling the APC model to new heights, the wholesale prepayment of OA quotas in read-and-publish agreements has created a number of new problems—in part with the aid of academic libraries. Most importantly, the replacement of subscription paywalls with APCs has erected novel barriers for authors of research publications.
A full-scale shift from a pay-to-read to a pay-to-say principle would be even more detrimental to scholars worldwide: it is relatively easy to circumvent the old paywalls, but there is no reliable solution to combat new inequities if one cannot afford to pay publication charges. Moreover, it is questionable whether such OA initiatives are in line with the goals of the initial BOAI (2002) declaration. The knowledge exchange was supposed to take place between the rich and the poor—not only from the rich to the poor.
Further support and promotion of read-and-publish agreements would mean drawing another set of boundaries between individual researchers, institutions, and countries according to their economic situation—ultimately leading to a blind alley and lots of wasted resources. And this would be done with the full complicity of academic libraries providing the necessary finances and infrastructural work. Instead of waiting for another 70 years for an OA transition to finally materialize, decision-makers should radically rethink their approach and divest their time and energy from such harmful deals.
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