UKB & Universities of the Netherlands OA

UKB (Universiteitsbibliotheken en de Koninklijke Bibliotheek — the Association of Dutch University Libraries and the National Library) is the body through which the Netherlands’ fourteen university libraries and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, the national library) coordinate open-access negotiations with academic publishers. For a Dutch research office fielding a question about why a given journal is “free to publish in” or which agreement covers a specific publisher, UKB — and specifically its negotiation programme, UKBsis — is usually the answer. This guide covers what UKB actually is, how it relates to transformative agreements signed under the name Universities of the Netherlands (UNL, the renamed VSNU), and how the Dutch model compares to the national consortia CASRAI has already covered in Germany, France, Finland, and India.

What UKB Is

UKB was founded in 1979 as a collaborative association of Dutch university libraries and the KB, created to strengthen the Netherlands’ scientific information infrastructure and knowledge cooperation both domestically and internationally. Its members are the university libraries of the Netherlands’ research universities plus the KB itself. Unlike a single central purchasing office, UKB functions as a standing collaboration structure: individual university libraries remain the formal institutions with their own budgets and licensing relationships, but they pool negotiation capacity, contract-management expertise, and bargaining power through UKB’s working groups and programmes rather than each library negotiating independently with every publisher.

UKBsis: The Negotiation Programme

UKB’s open-access and licensing negotiations run through a specific programme called UKBsis (Scholarly Information Services). UKBsis negotiates deals with publishers for both subscription access and open-access publishing, supports the negotiation teams that sit down with individual publishers, and — per UKB’s own description of the programme — works to strengthen national oversight of negotiations as part of the Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) Open Access Roadmap. By centralizing this work, UKBsis is intended to give the Dutch university sector more consistent bargaining power and reduce the duplicated effort of each institution’s open-access specialists negotiating the same publisher separately. UKBsis also maintains a data hub of Dutch research-article metadata (drawing on sources including Crossref, OpenAIRE, and Unpaywall, covering several hundred thousand Dutch articles published since 2018) that negotiation teams use to track publication volume and OA status by publisher — the kind of evidence base a consortium needs to argue for particular terms in a renewal.

Who Actually Signs the Agreements: UKB, UNL, NFU, and NWO

This is the detail that trips people up: UKB and UKBsis do the negotiating, but the name on the final agreement is not always “UKB.” For major national read-and-publish agreements with large commercial publishers, the signing parties are typically Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) — the association of Dutch research universities, renamed from VSNU (Vereniging van Universiteiten) — together with the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and often the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), covering their affiliated researchers as corresponding authors. UKB’s library expertise and UKBsis’s negotiation infrastructure sit underneath these deals, but the formal counterparty a publisher lists is the university-sector association, not the library consortium by name. For smaller or more specialized publishers, UKB itself is sometimes the named signatory on behalf of a defined subset of member institutions — for example, a 2022 read-and-publish agreement between AIP Publishing and UKB ran through the end of 2024 and explicitly covered eight named UKB member institutions rather than the full national sector. In practice, expect UKB/UKBsis to be the operational and negotiating layer in both cases, with the identity of the formal signatory varying by deal size and publisher.

What Dutch Read-and-Publish Agreements Look Like

Dutch agreements generally follow the same read-and-publish structure other national consortia use: a single combined fee covers both reading access to a publisher’s subscription content and open-access publishing (typically with the APC waived) for corresponding authors at participating institutions, for a defined multi-year term. Two examples on the public record:

Elsevier: the current national agreement, negotiated on behalf of UNL, NFU, NWO, and KNAW, covers articles with an original submission date between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2026, waives the APC for eligible corresponding authors at participating institutions, and offers a choice between commercial (CC BY) and non-commercial licensing depending on the journal. It succeeded an earlier 2020–2024 agreement.
Springer (Springer Nature): Dutch universities, university medical centres, and KNAW institutes have had open-access publishing rights bundled with subscription access to Springer journals since 2015, under a renewal first announced in 2014.

As with every national consortium guide in this series, treat specific participating-institution lists, exact pricing, and renewal dates as subject to change at each contract cycle — confirm current terms directly against UKB’s own agreement pages (ukb.nl) or the relevant publisher’s open-access agreement page before citing them in anything time-sensitive.

Reported Open-Access Outcomes

UKB has reported that the great majority of Dutch research output is now published open access — figures in the low-to-mid 90s percent have been cited in UKB’s own communications around recent publisher agreements. Treat any specific percentage as a self-reported consortium figure tied to a particular announcement date rather than an independently audited, continuously updated statistic, and re-check it against UKB’s current publications before repeating it in a more formal context.

How UKB Compares to Other National OA Consortia

UKB sits alongside a small set of national or quasi-national library consortia that CASRAI has covered individually, each negotiating open-access terms for its own country’s university sector:

Projekt DEAL (Germany) — negotiates nationwide publish-and-read agreements on behalf of nearly all German research and academic institutions, run by the MPDL (Max Planck Digital Library) on behalf of the Alliance of German Science Organisations.
Couperin (France) — the French university library consortium that negotiates national open-access and subscription deals.
FinELib (Finland) — the Finnish National Library-coordinated consortium performing the same function for Finnish universities and research institutes.
One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) (India) — structurally different: a centrally government-funded national reading-access scheme administered through INFLIBNET, not primarily a publish-and-read/transformative model.

The common thread across DEAL, Couperin, FinELib, and UKB is the transformative-agreement model: pool national demand, negotiate a combined read-and-publish fee, and use the resulting scale to push publishers toward open-access-by-default terms. Where the Dutch model differs procedurally is the split between UKB/UKBsis as the negotiating and library-operations layer and UNL/NFU/NWO/KNAW as the formal signatories on the largest agreements — a two-tier structure that is less pronounced in some of the other national consortia.

Not to Be Confused With DANS

UKB is sometimes confused with DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services), the Netherlands’ national research-data archive — but the two do different jobs. DANS, a joint institute of KNAW and NWO, is a repository: it archives research datasets and supports data management plan compliance. UKB is a library consortium that negotiates journal subscription and open-access publishing agreements — it does not archive data. The two organizations do intersect operationally: when DANS’s former NARCIS research-output portal was discontinued in July 2023, its replacement, the Netherlands Research Portal, was built through a collaboration between UKB, SURF, and OpenAIRE. That collaboration is about output-metadata aggregation, not open-access contract negotiation, and shouldn’t be read as UKB taking over any part of DANS’s archiving role.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is UKB the same organization as Universities of the Netherlands (UNL)?

No. UKB is the association of Dutch university libraries and the national library (KB); Universities of the Netherlands (UNL, formerly VSNU) is the association of Dutch research universities themselves. UKB and its UKBsis programme handle the library-side negotiation work; UNL is often the formal signatory, alongside NFU, NWO, and KNAW, on the largest national transformative agreements.

What does UKBsis stand for and what does it do?

UKBsis is UKB’s Scholarly Information Services programme — the operational unit that negotiates publisher agreements for subscription access and open-access publishing, supports the negotiation teams, and maintains shared data infrastructure (a metadata hub of Dutch research articles) used as evidence in negotiations.

Does every Dutch university automatically get the same open-access terms?

Coverage depends on which institutions are named as participants in a given agreement. National deals negotiated through UNL/NFU/NWO typically cover the great majority of Dutch universities, university medical centres, and KNAW institutes, but some smaller or publisher-specific agreements (as with UKB’s earlier AIP Publishing deal) name a defined subset of member institutions rather than the entire sector — always check the participating-institution list for the specific publisher agreement in question.

Is UKB the right organization to contact about depositing a dataset?

No — for dataset archiving and DMP-repository questions in the Netherlands, DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) is the relevant national body, not UKB. UKB’s role is journal subscription and open-access publishing negotiation.

How does the Dutch model compare to Germany’s Projekt DEAL?

Both pursue nationwide publish-and-read agreements and both centralize negotiation through a dedicated body (UKBsis for the Netherlands, MPDL-run Projekt DEAL for Germany), but the Dutch structure more explicitly splits the negotiating body (UKB/UKBsis) from the formal contract signatory on the largest deals (Universities of the Netherlands, NFU, NWO, KNAW).

UKB and Universities of the Netherlands: How the Dutch Library Consortium Negotiates Open-Access Agreements