The Royal Danish Library (Det Kgl. Bibliotek) is Denmark’s national negotiator for open-access publishing agreements. Since 2019 it has held the licensing mandate previously exercised by DEFF (Denmark’s Electronic Research Library), striking “read-and-publish” and “subscribe-to-open” style deals with dozens of academic publishers on behalf of Danish universities, university colleges, and public research institutions. For a corresponding author affiliated with a signatory Danish institution, these agreements are usually the reason a journal article can be published open access with no article processing charge (APC) invoice ever reaching the author.
From DEFF to the Royal Danish Library: how the consortium came to be
Denmark’s national licensing function did not originate at the Royal Danish Library. It sat with DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek), a cross-sector body that negotiated shared electronic-resource licences for Danish research and education from the early 2000s onward. DEFF was dissolved in June 2019, and its national-license-consortium role was transferred to the Royal Danish Library, which has run the function since. The library’s negotiation activity sits alongside, but is organisationally distinct from, DeiC (Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation), which coordinates computing, storage, and network infrastructure for Danish research rather than publisher licensing — a distinction worth keeping straight, since both operate under similar-sounding Danish acronyms.
Who actually sets the negotiating mandate
The Royal Danish Library does not set open-access strategy unilaterally. Danish universities — coordinated through the Danish Rectors’ Conference (Danske Universiteter) — work with the library to define a shared strategic mandate ahead of the largest national negotiations, covering the terms the library is authorised to accept on institutions’ behalf: acceptable licensing terms, APC-inclusion scope, and pricing ceilings relative to prior subscription spend. This is the same “collective mandate, single national negotiator” structure used by comparable consortia elsewhere in Europe — see CASRAI’s guides to Norway’s Sikt and the UK’s Jisc for close structural parallels, and Germany’s Projekt DEAL for a national consortium negotiating on a similarly ambitious scale.
What a Royal Danish Library agreement typically includes
The library reports having negotiated licence agreements with more than 65 scholarly publishers, spanning large commercial houses (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis), scholarly societies (American Chemical Society, IEEE, Royal Society of Chemistry), and university presses and non-profits (Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, JSTOR). Within that portfolio, the agreements that matter most for open-access publishing generally take one of two forms:
- Read-and-publish / transformative agreements — a single institutional payment bundles subscription reading access with open-access publishing rights, so an eligible corresponding author’s APC is waived rather than invoiced. See CASRAI’s dictionary entry on the read-and-publish agreement and the companion guide on how read-and-publish agreements work for the underlying mechanics.
- Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) agreements — the library’s continued subscription funds a journal or collection being made openly available to everyone, publisher-wide, rather than waiving APCs article by article. The Royal Danish Library has adopted this model with several publishers, including access to Johns Hopkins University Press journals on an S2O basis.
Eligibility is consistently tied to the corresponding author’s institutional affiliation at a Danish signatory institution — co-authors elsewhere do not make an article eligible on their own, and the library’s own guidance sets out publisher-specific conditions (eligible article types, licence choice, embargo terms where APC waivers don’t apply) rather than one uniform rule across all 65-plus publishers.
Notable individual publisher agreements
Several of the Royal Danish Library’s publisher-specific deals are publicly documented by the publishers themselves:
- Elsevier maintains a national open-access agreement with the Royal Danish Library’s National Licence consortium, covering eligible corresponding authors publishing in Elsevier’s participating journals.
- Springer Nature describes a transformative open-access agreement with the Royal Danish Library in which more than 20 Danish institutions participate.
- Wiley announced a four-year open-access agreement with the Royal Danish Library covering 2026 through 2029, per Wiley’s own newsroom announcement — one of the longer publisher-consortium terms confirmed for Denmark.
Exact scope, eligible journal lists, and licence terms (typically CC BY, sometimes CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND depending on journal and publisher) change on each renewal cycle. Researchers should treat any specific figure here as a snapshot, not a standing guarantee, and confirm current terms directly before submitting.
How Danish researchers find out if they’re covered
The Royal Danish Library publishes a Journal Finder tool that lets an author search whether a specific journal is part of a current national open-access agreement, and whether that coverage includes an APC waiver or discount. Because eligibility hinges on the corresponding author’s specific institutional affiliation and the exact journal (not just the publisher), authors are expected to check Journal Finder — or their own institutional library’s open-access guidance — before assuming a submission will be covered, rather than relying on the publisher’s general marketing description of “Denmark has an open-access agreement with us.”
How this compares to other national consortium models
The Royal Danish Library’s structure — a single national library acting as licensing authority, with a university-sector mandate behind it — sits within a well-established European pattern rather than being unique to Denmark. Comparable national or quasi-national OA-negotiation bodies covered elsewhere on CASRAI include Germany’s Projekt DEAL, the UK’s Jisc, Norway’s Sikt, and Japan’s JUSTICE consortium. What distinguishes Denmark structurally is that the negotiating authority sits inside the national library itself rather than a separate library-consortium or higher-education IT body — a model closer to how some other national libraries have absorbed licensing functions historically held by dedicated research-library consortia.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Royal Danish Library the same body as DeiC?
No. The Royal Danish Library negotiates publisher licensing and open-access agreements. DeiC (Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation) is a separate body coordinating computing, storage, and network infrastructure for Danish research. The two are easy to conflate because both operate under similar Danish e-infrastructure/e-resource acronyms, but they have distinct remits.
Does every Danish university automatically get open-access coverage under these agreements?
Coverage depends on which institutions are signatories to a given publisher agreement, not automatic sector-wide inclusion — agreement participant lists vary by publisher and renewal cycle, which is why Journal Finder (or an institution’s own library) is the authoritative source for a specific author’s eligibility, not a general assumption about “Denmark’s national deal.”
What happened to DEFF?
DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek), the cross-sector body that previously negotiated Denmark’s shared electronic-resource licences, was dissolved in June 2019. Its national-license-consortium function transferred to the Royal Danish Library, which has held it since.
Are these agreements the same as an APC waiver fund?
No. A national read-and-publish or S2O agreement is an institutional-level licence negotiated centrally with a publisher, with eligibility determined automatically by the corresponding author’s affiliation. A library APC fund, by contrast, is typically a separate, capped, per-article grant an author applies for individually — the two mechanisms can coexist at the same institution but work differently. See CASRAI’s guide to read-and-publish agreements for the distinction in more depth.
