By the close of 2025, the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL) had reached in-principle 2026 agreements with four of the largest scholarly publishers: Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and, last to close, Elsevier. All four are read-and-publish-style transformative agreements negotiated collectively across Australian and New Zealand university libraries rather than institution-by-institution — the first full year of bargaining under CAUL’s newly unified trans-Tasman structure.
What CAUL negotiated for 2026
CAUL’s Content Procurement Service coordinates open-access and subscription licensing on behalf of its member libraries, with individual agreements published and tracked through the international ESAC (Enabling Open Scholarship through Academic Collaboration) registry. For 2026, the four large commercial-publisher agreements share a common shape: uncapped hybrid open-access publishing across each publisher’s full journal portfolio, available to eligible corresponding authors at participating institutions with no separate per-article charge, alongside continued subscription (read) access. CAUL’s public guide to these deals lists roughly two dozen further publisher agreements of varying scope — from Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press to SAGE and De Gruyter — but the four majors are what most Australian and New Zealand research-active authors will interact with directly.
Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and Wiley
These three agreements were finalised earlier in the 2026 negotiating cycle and, per Universities Australia’s public statements, provide open-access publishing at no individual cost to authors, including uncapped hybrid OA across each publisher’s full portfolio and continued support for fully gold open-access journals.
Elsevier — the deal that nearly wasn’t
The Elsevier negotiation is the one worth understanding in more detail, because it did not follow the same quiet path as the other three. According to Universities Australia’s own account, talks paused in November 2025 before restarting and reaching an in-principle agreement announced on 16 December 2025, with member universities having prepared contingency plans for a possible extended loss of access to Elsevier’s roughly 1,659 journals if no deal was reached. CAUL’s Content Procurement Chair, Hero Macdonald, was quoted framing the outcome against that backdrop: gains of this scale, she noted, have in most comparable international cases only been secured after significant disruption to access.
The agreement that emerged, effective from 1 January 2026, delivers what Universities Australia describes as a substantial reduction in sector-wide expenditure, uncapped hybrid open-access publishing across Elsevier’s full portfolio (including Cell Press and The Lancet titles), and terms aimed at addressing inequities associated with Elsevier’s previous, legacy pricing structure. Elsevier’s fully gold open-access titles sit outside the agreement’s scope. CAUL and Universities Australia project that more than 10,000 Australian and New Zealand research articles will be published open access through Elsevier under the 2026 terms.
Why a trans-Tasman framework
The four-deal outcome reflects a structural change at CAUL itself, not just a strong negotiating year. Through 2025, CAUL completed a shift from the Council of Australian University Librarians to the Council of Australasian University Librarians, formally welcoming Aotearoa New Zealand university libraries as full constitutional members rather than as an affiliated or observer group. That gives CAUL a larger, combined body of subscribing and publishing institutions to negotiate on behalf of across both countries in a single set of talks per publisher, rather than Australian and New Zealand consortia bargaining separately (or not at all) with the same publishers. For research administrators, the practical effect is that eligibility and OA-publishing terms under these agreements are now assessed on a shared trans-Tasman basis rather than varying by country.
What this means for researchers and research offices
For corresponding authors at a participating CAUL member institution, publishing under one of these four agreements should mean an eligible manuscript accepted in a covered journal is made hybrid or gold open access automatically, without the author or their grant needing to separately fund an article processing charge. Research offices tracking open-access compliance against funder mandates (for example Australian Research Council or Health and Medical Research Council policy, or New Zealand funder equivalents) should confirm eligibility rules directly against CAUL’s published agreement pages before assuming blanket coverage — read-and-publish deals commonly carry article-type, corresponding-author, or affiliation conditions that vary by publisher. See CASRAI’s guide to how read-and-publish agreements work for authors and the broader primer on open-access publishing models and mandates for how these terms map onto gold, green, and hybrid OA more generally.
Frequently asked questions
What is CAUL?
CAUL is the Council of Australasian University Librarians (rebranded from Council of Australian University Librarians in 2025), the peak body coordinating university library policy, including collective publisher licensing and open-access negotiations, across Australia and, since its 2025 constitutional expansion, New Zealand.
Which publishers signed 2026 CAUL agreements?
Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Elsevier all reached in-principle 2026 agreements with CAUL, alongside roughly two dozen smaller-scope agreements with other academic publishers tracked in CAUL’s public agreement guide and the ESAC registry.
Did negotiations with Elsevier really stall?
Yes — per Universities Australia’s public account, talks paused in November 2025 and member institutions prepared contingency plans for possible loss of access before negotiations resumed and an in-principle agreement was announced on 16 December 2025, effective 1 January 2026.
Does the Elsevier 2026 agreement cover every Elsevier journal?
It covers uncapped hybrid open-access publishing across Elsevier’s full portfolio, including Cell Press and The Lancet titles, but Elsevier’s fully gold open-access journals are excluded from the agreement.
Do these agreements apply equally to New Zealand institutions?
Yes in principle — they were negotiated under CAUL’s trans-Tasman framework following New Zealand university libraries’ 2025 admission as full constitutional CAUL members, though individual eligibility should still be confirmed institution-by-institution.
