TL;DR: Sweden’s Bibsam Consortium, coordinated by the National Library of Sweden (Kungliga biblioteket, KB), has adopted an action plan under which it will no longer sign new agreements covering reading and publishing in hybrid journals. From 2026 onward, Bibsam will negotiate only for publication in fully open-access journals, applying that rule to all hybrid titles regardless of publisher. The decision follows a 2023 recommendation from SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions, on Sweden’s path beyond transformative agreements, and is paired with dedicated funder support for publishing in fully open-access venues.
What the Bibsam Consortium is
Bibsam is Sweden’s national licensing and open-access consortium, administered by the National Library of Sweden on behalf of the country’s universities, university colleges, and public research institutions. It negotiates centrally with academic publishers so that individual Swedish institutions don’t each run separate licensing negotiations — the same centralized-negotiation model used by Germany’s Projekt DEAL, France’s Couperin, Finland’s FinELib, the Netherlands’ UKB, and the UK’s Jisc. Like those consortia, Bibsam has spent much of the past decade building Read & Publish agreements — deals that bundle subscription reading access with fee-free open-access publishing rights for corresponding authors — as transitional vehicles meant to shift payment flows away from subscriptions and toward open access.
The policy shift: hybrid is out, gold-only is in from 2026
The Bibsam Consortium’s steering committee has adopted an action plan stating that the consortium should not sign agreements for reading and publishing in hybrid journals, and should instead negotiate only for publication in open-access journals — with that approach applying from 2026 to all hybrid journals, regardless of publisher. In practice, this draws a hard line between two categories of venue that Read & Publish deals have historically treated the same way:
- Hybrid journals — subscription journals that also offer open-access publishing on a per-article basis. Most of the large transformative agreements Bibsam and its peer consortia signed over the past several years covered exactly this category, bundling continued subscription access with growing open-access publishing quotas.
- Fully open-access (“gold”) journals — venues that publish exclusively open access, with no subscription/paywalled tier at all. Under the new action plan, this is the only category Bibsam will negotiate new reading-and-publishing terms for going forward.
The rationale, per the National Library of Sweden’s own account of the decision, is to redirect payment away from subscription-based publishing systems and toward open-access publishing, improve pricing transparency, help contain costs, and support researcher-driven migration toward journals and publishing models that are open access by design rather than by side-payment. The action plan explicitly builds on a 2023 recommendation from SUHF (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions) on Sweden’s strategy for the period after transformative agreements — a signal that this is a coordinated, sector-wide position among Swedish higher-education leadership rather than a unilateral library decision.
What happens to existing hybrid agreements
The 2026 cutoff applies to new agreements, not necessarily to hybrid contracts already in force. Several of Bibsam’s existing publisher deals run on multi-year terms that extend into or through 2026 — for example, its agreement with the American Physical Society runs a hybrid agreement period from 2020 through the end of 2026 alongside a separate gold agreement period from 2023 through the end of 2026. Institutions and researchers should expect a transition period in which some previously negotiated hybrid terms continue to run their course, while any new or renewed Bibsam agreements from 2026 onward are negotiated on a gold-only basis. Researchers publishing under Bibsam should check the specific terms of their institution’s current publisher agreements rather than assume hybrid coverage has ended everywhere at once.
Funder support for gold open-access publishing
The policy shift is paired with direct funder support for publishing in fully open-access venues. Sweden’s major research funders — the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), Forte, Formas, and Vinnova — have jointly financed publishing costs for 2026 with a group of publishers that publish exclusively open-access journals, so that researchers at Bibsam Consortium organizations can publish with them without paying article-level fees. Publishers named in that funder-backed arrangement include Copernicus Publications, eLife, Frontiers, JMIR Publications, MDPI, MJS Publishing, Pensoft Publishers, and PLOS. This gives Swedish researchers a fee-free gold-open-access route that doesn’t depend on a hybrid Read & Publish deal being in place with a given subscription publisher.
Why this matters beyond Sweden
Bibsam’s move is a visible test of an argument open-access advocates have made for years: that transformative Read & Publish agreements, while useful for moving volume out from behind paywalls, risk locking in subscription-era pricing and hybrid-journal business models indefinitely rather than actually transitioning the market to open access. Other national consortia have taken different paths on the same question — some, like Couperin and Projekt DEAL, have continued to renew large hybrid Read & Publish packages, while FinELib and others have periodically walked away from specific publisher renewals over price or terms (see, for example, recent “big deal” cancellations and the swissuniversities/Springer Nature standoff earlier in 2026). Bibsam’s action plan is a more structural move than a single renewal dispute: it’s a standing policy against signing new hybrid deals at all, not a one-off negotiating stance against one publisher. Research offices and library consortia elsewhere are likely to watch how Swedish authors’ publishing patterns, and Bibsam’s negotiating leverage with major hybrid publishers, evolve once the policy takes effect.
What this means for researchers and research administrators
- Check current coverage before assuming a fee waiver applies. Whether a specific hybrid journal is still covered under a Bibsam Read & Publish deal depends on that publisher’s specific contract terms and end date, not on the 2026 policy alone.
- Fully open-access journals are the more reliable fee-free route going forward. The funder-backed list of gold-only publishers (Copernicus, eLife, Frontiers, JMIR, MDPI, MJS Publishing, Pensoft, PLOS) offers fee-free publishing for 2026 independent of the Bibsam Read & Publish negotiations.
- Expect this to affect publisher negotiating dynamics generally. A national consortium the size of Sweden’s declining to renew hybrid terms is a data point every publisher negotiating with other national consortia will be aware of.
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean Swedish researchers can no longer publish open access in hybrid journals?
Not automatically. It means Bibsam will not negotiate new consortium-wide terms covering open-access publishing in hybrid journals from 2026 onward. Researchers may still be able to publish open access in a hybrid journal through other routes (author-paid APCs, other funding sources, or a hybrid agreement still running out its existing contract term) — but the automatic, fee-free consortium coverage that Read & Publish deals provided is specifically what the policy is phasing out for new agreements.
Is Bibsam the same as SwePub?
No. Bibsam is a licensing and open-access negotiation consortium. SwePub is a separate national aggregator of Swedish research publication metadata. Both are connected to Swedish research infrastructure but serve different functions and are administered separately.
What is a “gold” open-access agreement, as distinct from “green” or “hybrid”?
Gold open access means the journal itself is open access with no subscription paywall at all. Hybrid means a subscription journal that also allows individual articles to be made open access, typically for a fee. Green open access refers to self-archiving a manuscript version in a repository rather than the journal’s own publishing route. Bibsam’s 2026 policy specifically targets ending new hybrid-journal agreements, not green open access, which operates independently of publisher negotiations.
Related CASRAI resources
- Read & Publish agreement (dictionary term)
- Projekt DEAL: Germany’s national consortium
- Couperin: France’s open-access consortium
- FinELib: Finland’s open-access consortium
- UKB: the Netherlands’ open-access consortium
- Jisc: the UK’s open-access negotiations
- swissuniversities ends Springer Nature no-deal gap
- Library “Big Deal” cancellations in 2026
Sources: National Library of Sweden / Bibsam Consortium (kb.se), publisher agreement pages (American Physical Society, Cambridge University Press).
