As some people abroad were interested in my earlier posts on the German DEAL contracts, I have decided to summarise here some key points of the new contracts with Wiley, Springer Nature and Elsevier. The three contracts differ in some aspects, but at least there are two issue they have in common: They are opt-in contracts , only those organisations that actively join the contract will benefit from the conditions.

Christian Gutknecht published an exciting posting on the Swiss EUR 57 million Elsevier deal in which he outlines the transformative Open Access agreement between Elsevier and swissuniversities. Since Germany has been trying for years to reach such a contract with Elsevier, it is worth comparing it with the two transformative contracts with Wiley and Springer Nature in Germany, which were reached and coordinated by Project DEAL.

The Norwegian consortium for higher education and research and the publishing house Elsevier agreed two days ago to a national license. This provides Norwegian researchers not only access to articles published in Elsevier’s journals (including the society journals as The Lancet or CELL Press) but also the opportunity to publish their results Open Access. Seven universities and 39 research institutions will benefit from the two-year agreement.