Projekt DEAL is Germany’s national negotiation consortium for large-scale transformative licensing agreements with major academic publishers. Since 2014, it has bargained nationwide “Publish-and-Read” deals on behalf of several hundred German universities, research institutes, and other academic institutions — replacing separate journal subscriptions and per-article APCs with a single negotiated fee that covers both reading access and open-access publishing. DEAL is one of the largest and longest-running examples of this licensing model anywhere in the world, and its three headline negotiations — with Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier — illustrate both how well the model can work and how difficult it can be to get a dominant publisher to agree to it at all. This guide covers what DEAL is, how its agreements are structured, what happened in each of the three major publisher negotiations, and why the consortium matters beyond Germany’s own borders.
What Is Projekt DEAL?
Projekt DEAL was launched in 2014 by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany (Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen) — the coordinating body for Germany’s major research and higher-education organizations, including the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), the Max Planck Society (MPG), the German Research Foundation (DFG), and other national research bodies. Its mandate was to negotiate nationwide licensing agreements with the largest scholarly publishers on behalf of German academic and research institutions, rather than leaving each university or library consortium to negotiate separately with every publisher on its own.
The actual contracting and negotiating work is carried out by MPDL Services GmbH, a subsidiary of the Max Planck Digital Library (the Max Planck Society’s central library and information infrastructure unit), acting on behalf of the DEAL consortium’s participating institutions. This is a common pattern in national licensing consortia: a single, well-resourced negotiating entity represents many institutions at once, so no individual university has to run its own multi-year negotiation with a publisher the size of Elsevier or Springer Nature.
DEAL’s stated goal is twofold: secure continued reading access to major publishers’ journal content for participating institutions, and shift the underlying payment model so that the money already spent on subscriptions instead funds open-access publishing, at no additional net cost to the German research sector. That second goal is what makes DEAL’s agreements “transformative” in the sense used across the wider open-access licensing landscape — see CASRAI’s dictionary entry on the transformative agreement concept for the general definition DEAL’s contracts are an instance of.
How a Publish-and-Read Agreement Works
DEAL’s contracts are usually described as “Publish and Read” agreements — the same underlying mechanism many consortia elsewhere call “Read and Publish,” with the word order emphasizing that publishing is the primary transaction and reading access follows from it, rather than the reverse. CASRAI’s companion guide, Read & Publish (Transformative) Agreements: How They Work for Authors, covers the author-facing mechanics of this model in general terms; DEAL is one of the largest real-world implementations of that same structure. In outline, a Publish-and-Read agreement under DEAL bundles two things into a single negotiated fee paid by the consortium to the publisher:
- Reading access — researchers at participating institutions retain access to the publisher’s paywalled journal content, similar to a traditional subscription “big deal.”
- Open-access publishing rights — corresponding authors at participating institutions can publish eligible articles open access, typically under a CC BY license, without a separate APC invoice, because the fee has already been settled at the consortium level.
Because the fee is intended to substitute for what institutions were already spending on subscriptions and APCs combined, DEAL and its publisher counterparts describe the agreements as cost-neutral in aggregate for the German research sector, even though the payment structure shifts from “pay to read” toward “pay to publish, read for free.” Participation is generally organized at the institutional level — individual German universities, Max Planck Institutes, and other research organizations opt into a given DEAL agreement rather than researchers enrolling individually, and eligibility for no-fee open-access publishing under a DEAL contract is normally tied to the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation, the same corresponding-author eligibility rule used across most transformative agreements globally.
The Three Major Publisher Negotiations
DEAL’s public profile rests largely on its negotiations with the three publishers that, between them, account for a large share of the journal articles German researchers publish and read: Wiley, Springer Nature, and Elsevier. The three negotiations produced very different outcomes and timelines.
Wiley: the first DEAL agreement (2019)
Wiley was the first major publisher to conclude a nationwide DEAL contract. The agreement was concluded on 15 January 2019, giving participating German institutions combined reading access to Wiley’s journal portfolio and the ability for eligible corresponding authors to publish open access in Wiley journals without paying an APC directly. As the first agreement of its kind at this scale, it served as an early proof of concept for the Publish-and-Read model DEAL was pursuing with the other two publishers.
Springer Nature: the largest transformative agreement of its kind (2019–2020, renewed 2023)
DEAL and Springer Nature signed a Memorandum of Understanding in August 2019, followed by a formal contract signed on 8 January 2020. The agreement took effect retroactively from 1 January 2020 and was described at the time by Springer Nature and DEAL as the world’s largest transformative open-access agreement concluded to date, covering open-access publishing and reading access for researchers at more than 700 participating German academic and research institutions. The agreement was renewed for a further multi-year term in late 2023, extending the arrangement rather than letting it lapse at the end of its original period. Because DEAL’s Springer Nature deal was the first agreement of this scale between a national consortium and one of the largest scholarly publishers, it became a widely cited reference point for other national and regional consortia negotiating similar deals elsewhere.
Elsevier: a breakdown, a multi-year gap, and an eventual agreement (2016–2023)
Elsevier’s negotiation with DEAL followed a very different path. Talks began in 2016, but broke down over disagreements about pricing and open-access terms, and negotiations stalled through 2017 and 2018. As a negotiating position, a number of German universities and research institutions chose not to renew their individual Elsevier subscriptions once their existing contracts lapsed during this period, rather than continuing to pay for access outside of a DEAL-negotiated agreement. That left a number of German institutions without regular, ongoing institutional access to Elsevier’s current-year journal content for an extended period, with researchers at those institutions relying on interlibrary loan, document-delivery services, or direct requests to authors to obtain specific articles in the meantime.
The standoff lasted several years. DEAL and Elsevier eventually reached a new agreement, signed on 1 September 2023 by MPDL Services GmbH and Elsevier, running for five years through the end of 2028. Coverage and pricing under the new agreement began in 2024: participating institutions gained combined reading access to Elsevier’s journal portfolio (including Cell Press and The Lancet titles) alongside open-access publishing rights for eligible corresponding authors. Publicly reported 2024 per-article publishing fees were roughly €2,550 for hybrid journals (rising 3% annually) and roughly €6,450 for Cell Press and The Lancet titles (rising 4% annually), with participating institutions’ eligible corresponding authors not charged a separate APC on top of the institutional fee. Unlike a blanket national mandate, the Elsevier agreement is opt-in at the institutional level — each German university or research organization independently decides whether to join the DEAL-Elsevier terms, continue without an Elsevier agreement, or arrange separate terms.
Why DEAL Matters for Researchers, Institutions, and the Broader Open-Access Movement
For an individual researcher at a participating German institution, the practical effect of a DEAL agreement is similar to any other Read-and-Publish deal: submitting to a covered journal as normal, and — if the corresponding author’s institution participates and the article falls within the agreement’s scope — publishing open access with no separate APC to arrange or pay. For research administrators and library staff, DEAL agreements shift a meaningful share of institutional licensing spend and open-access compliance work to a single, nationally negotiated contract rather than dozens of separate institutional deals, which is the main administrative efficiency the consortium model is designed to capture.
Beyond Germany, DEAL is frequently cited in the broader open-access transformation movement as one of the earliest and largest examples of a national consortium using its collective negotiating leverage to convert subscription spending into open-access spending at scale, rather than relying solely on funder mandates (such as Plan S-aligned policies) or individual-author APC funding. The Elsevier standoff in particular is often referenced as a case study in what happens when a national consortium is prepared to let institutional subscriptions lapse rather than accept terms it considers unfavorable — a negotiating stance with real short-term costs (reduced convenience of access for researchers) in service of a longer-term structural goal.
DEAL in Context: Other National and Regional Consortia
DEAL is one of many national or regional consortia that negotiate transformative agreements on behalf of member institutions; it is not the only one, and other countries and regions run structurally similar programs with their own publisher relationships, pricing, and timelines. The ESAC Initiative, coordinated by the Max Planck Digital Library, maintains a public registry tracking transformative agreements from consortia and individual institutions across dozens of countries, giving a sense of how widespread this licensing model has become since the late 2010s. What distinguishes DEAL within that broader landscape is less the mechanism itself — Publish-and-Read agreements follow a recognizable structure wherever they’re negotiated, as CASRAI’s general Read & Publish guide describes — and more the scale of DEAL’s coverage (hundreds of institutions negotiated as a single bloc) and the length and public visibility of its Elsevier standoff, which made it a widely watched test of how much leverage a national consortium can exert against a dominant publisher.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does DEAL stand for?
DEAL is the name of the project itself (Projekt DEAL) rather than a strict acronym expanded consistently in its own materials; it is consistently referred to as Germany’s national consortium for negotiating transformative open-access agreements with major academic publishers.
Who actually negotiates DEAL’s agreements?
MPDL Services GmbH, a subsidiary of the Max Planck Digital Library, carries out the contracting and negotiation on behalf of the DEAL consortium’s participating institutions, under a mandate from the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany.
Is every German university part of every DEAL agreement?
No. Participation is organized at the institutional level, and for at least the Elsevier agreement is explicitly opt-in — individual universities and research institutions decide whether to join a given DEAL contract. Coverage under the Wiley and Springer Nature agreements has similarly depended on institutional participation, even though both were framed as very broad, nationwide deals covering hundreds of institutions.
Why did the Elsevier negotiation take so much longer than Wiley or Springer Nature?
Talks that began in 2016 stalled over pricing and open-access terms, and a number of German institutions chose not to renew individual Elsevier subscriptions rather than continue paying outside of a DEAL-negotiated deal, leaving many without regular institutional access to current Elsevier content for an extended period. The standoff continued for several years before DEAL and Elsevier signed a new five-year agreement in September 2023, with coverage beginning in 2024.
Does a DEAL agreement mean an author never pays an APC?
Only for eligible articles. Coverage depends on the corresponding author’s institution being a DEAL participant for that specific publisher’s agreement and the article falling within the agreement’s scope (journal, article type, and any annual limits the contract sets). Articles outside that scope, or from non-participating institutions, follow the publisher’s standard APC or subscription terms instead.
Is DEAL the same thing as a Read and Publish agreement generally?
DEAL is a specific national consortium; “Publish and Read” (or Read and Publish) is the general licensing model its agreements use. Many other consortia and individual institutions around the world negotiate structurally similar deals under the same general model, tracked collectively by initiatives such as the ESAC Initiative’s transformative agreement registry. See CASRAI’s Read & Publish Agreements guide for how the model works generally, independent of any one consortium.
Related CASRAI Reading
- Read & Publish (Transformative) Agreements: How They Work for Authors — the general mechanics of the licensing model DEAL’s contracts use.
- Transformative agreement — the broader dictionary definition.
- Gold vs. Green vs. Diamond vs. Hybrid Open Access — how DEAL-covered publishing fits into the wider open-access color taxonomy.
- Article processing charge (APC) — the per-article fee a Publish-and-Read agreement is designed to replace for eligible authors.
- Gold open access — the licensing outcome most DEAL-covered articles publish under.
- Article Processing Charges: A Guide — the wider APC-funding landscape DEAL agreements sit alongside.
Sourcing note: dates and terms in this guide are drawn from Projekt DEAL’s negotiating partners’ own public announcements (Max Planck Society/MPDL, Springer Nature, Elsevier) and corroborating trade and higher-education press coverage (Times Higher Education, Science, Publishing Perspectives). Projekt DEAL’s own site (projekt-deal.de) returned an access error during this page’s research; where a figure could not be cross-checked directly against projekt-deal.de, it is sourced to these corroborating outlets instead. Specific per-article fees and institution counts should be reconfirmed against current publisher or DEAL announcements before being cited as still current, since transformative-agreement terms are renegotiated on a multi-year cycle.
