Three research libraries made significant, publicly documented breaks from ‘Big Deal’ journal-package subscriptions taking effect in 2026: the University of Alberta ended its Springer Nature bundle, the University of Delaware cancelled its Wiley package, and the University of British Columbia dropped its Sage ‘all titles’ agreement and its standing PLOS article-processing-charge (APC) support. Each library cites the same underlying pressure — annual price increases of roughly 5–9% against flat or shrinking collections budgets — and each has rolled out article-level workarounds (interlibrary loan, pay-per-article services, and discovery-layer tools) rather than leaving researchers with no path to the content at all.
A ‘Big Deal’ is the industry term for a bundled subscription in which a library pays one negotiated price for electronic access to a publisher’s entire journal portfolio, rather than subscribing title-by-title. The model, dominant since the late 1990s, has been unwinding for years — the University of California’s high-profile break with Elsevier in 2019 is the reference case most librarians cite — but 2026 has brought a fresh, concentrated round of cancellations at North American research universities, tracked in aggregate by SPARC’s Big Deal Cancellation Tracking project.
University of Alberta ends its Springer Nature bundle
Effective January 1, 2026, the University of Alberta Library’s subscription to 2,168 Springer Nature journals lapsed, according to the library’s own December 2025 announcement. The library states the package cost over CAD $900,000 annually and, in its assessment, did not perform well enough against comparable packages in terms of the proportion of titles genuinely valuable to University of Alberta research. The timing of the end of a broader statewide/provincial Springer Nature contract, combined with what the library describes as the publisher’s unwillingness to negotiate, led to the decision to unbundle rather than renew.
Access to Springer Nature content published before January 1, 2026 continues uninterrupted. For newly published articles, the library points researchers to interlibrary loan, integrated directly into its library-search interface, and notes that a meaningful share of current Springer content publishes openly regardless of subscription status — the library cites a median open-access rate of 41% across a sample of key titles, ranging from 16% to 71% by journal. Nature-branded journals, Palgrave Macmillan titles, Springer ebooks, and BioMed Central journals are unaffected and remain accessible through separate arrangements. The University of Alberta’s announcement also situates its own decision within a wider Canadian pattern, noting that Simon Fraser University and UBC were each reassessing large publisher agreements in the same period, and that Brock University (2024) and Queen’s University (2018) had already exited their own Springer agreements.
University of Delaware cancels its Wiley package
The University of Delaware Library cancelled its Wiley journal package effective January 1, 2026, following the same path it took with Elsevier in 2021, according to the library’s own January 2026 announcement and a related June 2026 follow-up on access workarounds. The library attributes the decision to sustained financial pressure: journal and database subscription costs have risen roughly 5–9% annually since the pandemic while the collections budget has stayed flat, a gap the library says it could no longer absorb. Reporting on the decision has also cited a review finding that a small share of titles in the package — around 2% — accounted for a disproportionate share of actual usage, informing the case for cancelling the broader bundle rather than continuing to pay for it in full.
Articles published in Wiley journals through the end of 2025 remain accessible under prior licensing terms. For content published from 2026 onward, the library has stood up three specific workarounds: interlibrary loan; a pilot of Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS), a pay-per-article service giving near-immediate access to individual Wiley PDFs, for which the library is covering the cost of the first several requests per person through the end of the pilot (originally capped at ten per person, later suspended so users could request without that limit); and broader discovery-layer tools (LibKey Discovery and the LibKey Nomad browser extension) that route users automatically toward whichever legitimate access path — subscription, open access, or interlibrary loan — applies to a given article.
UBC drops its Sage ‘all titles’ deal and standing PLOS APC support
UBC Library ended its Sage ‘all titles’ package agreement effective December 31, 2025, moving instead to a selective, usage-informed subscription model, per the library’s own September 2025 update from the University Librarian. The same announcement ended UBC’s standing institutional support for PLOS article-processing charges on the same date. UBC frames both moves as part of a broader reconsideration of its relationship with the five publishers — Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Sage — that together account for close to 40% of the library’s serials budget, and describes Sage specifically as the least-used of its major packages by UBC researchers and the one with the lowest year-over-year rate of UBC-authored publications.
UBC purchased the full Sage backfile through 2025 outright, so previously published Sage content remains permanently accessible regardless of the cancellation. For newly published Sage articles, the library points researchers to interlibrary loan, which it says typically returns access same-day or within one to two days. For PLOS, UBC has reverted to the more common model in which authors cover APCs from their own research or institutional funds rather than drawing on a centralized library fund.
A pattern, not three isolated decisions
Three of the deals detailed above ended within roughly the same twelve-month window and were each announced by the library itself, citing the same structural driver: publisher price increases that have consistently outpaced flat or shrinking collections budgets since the pandemic, applied against ‘Big Deal’ packages priced for breadth rather than demonstrated local use. None of the three institutions describes the change as a full retreat from the affected publisher — each retains access to already-published back content and has built out one or more article-level substitutes (interlibrary loan, pay-per-article services, or discovery-layer tooling) for newly published work. That combination — cancel the bundle, keep the backfile, route new-article demand through cheaper on-demand channels — is close to the standard playbook research libraries have used in Big Deal cancellations going back to the University of California’s 2019 break with Elsevier, and is consistent with the broader library-sector shift toward transformative agreements and read-and-publish agreements as an alternative to flat-fee bundled subscriptions.
For research administrators and researchers at any of these institutions, the practical implication is the same regardless of which publisher is involved: articles published before each cancellation’s effective date remain accessible as before, while articles published afterward may require an extra step — an interlibrary loan request, a pay-per-article tool, or a browser extension that surfaces the legitimate free or open-access copy of a given DOI. Researchers who rely on rapid full-text access to very recent Springer Nature, Wiley, or Sage content at these institutions should budget for that extra lag when planning literature reviews or urgent citation checks.
Frequently asked questions
What is a library ‘Big Deal’?
A Big Deal is a bundled subscription arrangement in which a library (or a consortium of libraries) pays one negotiated fee for electronic access to a publisher’s full journal portfolio, or a large fixed subset of it, rather than subscribing to individual titles separately. The model let libraries dramatically expand the number of journals available to their users starting in the late 1990s, but ties spending to the publisher’s whole catalogue rather than to titles with demonstrated local demand.
Does cancelling a Big Deal mean researchers lose access to everything from that publisher?
No, based on how each of the three cancellations above has been structured. In every case, content published before the cancellation’s effective date remains accessible under the prior license, and the library has stood up at least one substitute — typically interlibrary loan, plus in some cases a pay-per-article service — for content published afterward. Access to very recent articles is slower and sometimes rationed (e.g., a per-user request cap during a pilot period), but not eliminated outright.
Is this specific to Canadian or U.S. libraries?
No. The pattern documented here spans both countries (Alberta and UBC in Canada, Delaware in the U.S.), and SPARC’s tracker documents a broader, ongoing wave of Big Deal cancellations at research libraries across North America and, in different forms, at UK and European universities renegotiating or declining Elsevier and other major-publisher deals for 2026.
