MALMAD, the digital information services division of Israel’s Inter-University Computation Center (IUCC) that negotiates national Read & Publish terms on behalf of the country’s universities, continues to extend its portfolio of open-access publisher agreements into the 2026-2028 window. The most recently confirmed renewal — a three-year Read & Publish agreement with The Company of Biologists, effective 1 January 2026 through 31 December 2028 — is the clearest dated data point in a broader pattern: MALMAD is the standing mechanism through which Israeli institutions collectively negotiate, fund, and renew open-access publishing terms, and 2026 has been an active renewal year across several of its publisher relationships.
What MALMAD is and why a single consortium matters
MALMAD operates as Israel’s national library consortium for higher education, centralizing the acquisition, licensing, and management of digital information services — including Read-and-Publish agreements — on behalf of participating universities and colleges rather than leaving each institution to negotiate separately with every publisher. Functionally, this is the same model used by national and regional consortia elsewhere (Jisc in the UK, Couperin in France, ProjektDEAL in Germany): pool institutional subscription and publishing spend, negotiate terms once, and pass a uniform, centrally funded open-access publishing route through to every affiliated researcher. According to IUCC’s own MALMAD open-access page, the consortium currently lists active Read & Publish or open-access arrangements with a substantial roster of major and society publishers — including ACM, ACS, AIP, Brill, Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter, Elsevier, IOP, Karger, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, The Company of Biologists, The Royal Society, and Wiley.
The confirmed 2026-2028 renewal: The Company of Biologists
The clearest, dated renewal currently verifiable is MALMAD’s agreement with The Company of Biologists, publisher of Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms, and Biology Open. Per the publisher’s own announcement, the renewed Read & Publish terms run from 1 January 2026 through 31 December 2028 and cover eight participating Israeli institutions, including Bar-Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Under the terms as described, corresponding authors at those institutions can publish an uncapped number of research articles immediately open access, without paying a per-article article processing charge (APC), while participating institutions retain unlimited reading access to the publisher’s journals, including archival content dating back to 1853. The publisher describes the arrangement as cost-neutral relative to the prior subscription-plus-APC baseline — a standard framing for a mature transformative agreement renewal rather than a first-time conversion.
The wider portfolio: renewal activity, not a single blanket deal
It is important to be precise about scope here: MALMAD’s open-access program is a rolling set of separate, bilaterally negotiated publisher agreements, not one master contract that resets on a single date. Publicly available renewal information varies by publisher and should not be conflated:
- The Company of Biologists: renewed through 31 December 2028 (confirmed above).
- Sage: publisher-published open-access agreement information for MALMAD lists coverage running from 1 January 2025 through 31 December 2027.
- Springer Nature: publisher-published information lists the current agreement running through 31 December 2026, putting it in a renewal window over the course of 2026.
- Wiley: MALMAD and Wiley have maintained a standing Read-and-Publish arrangement since a three-year deal announced in late 2021 covering Wiley’s hybrid and fully open-access journals; Wiley’s author-facing MALMAD page continues to describe an active agreement for Israeli-affiliated corresponding authors.
- Elsevier: Elsevier’s own agreements page confirms a standing MALMAD open-access arrangement covering eligible corresponding authors at participating institutions, without a publicly listed end date at the time of writing.
Individual end dates and renewal cadences differ publisher to publisher, and not every MALMAD institution is necessarily eligible under every individual publisher agreement — IUCC’s own program page notes that participation varies by publisher and that hybrid journal and fully gold open-access terms are not always identical across the roster. Research administrators and library staff at MALMAD-affiliated institutions should confirm current terms directly with IUCC/MALMAD or the relevant publisher rather than assuming a uniform “through 2028” end date applies consortium-wide; only the Company of Biologists renewal is independently confirmed with that specific end date as of this writing.
Why this matters for research administrators outside Israel
MALMAD is a useful reference case for exactly the kind of centralized, national-consortium negotiation model that CASRAI’s grants and publishing communities increasingly track: a single body absorbing the administrative and financial complexity of open-access compliance so individual researchers and their institutions don’t have to track APC eligibility, funder mandates, and publisher terms deal-by-deal. For institutions evaluating whether to join or expand a national or regional consortium agreement for open-access publishing, MALMAD’s rolling renewal pattern — staggered end dates across publishers, centrally negotiated and centrally funded, uncapped APC-free publishing for affiliated corresponding authors — illustrates both the administrative benefit (one negotiation point, predictable institutional cost) and the tracking burden (renewal dates and eligibility terms genuinely do vary publisher by publisher, and need to be monitored as such rather than assumed to move in lockstep).
See CASRAI’s guide to APC waiver eligibility by publisher and region for how these institutional and consortium-level terms interact with funder-mandated open-access requirements, and the Scholarly Publishing pillar for the broader vocabulary around read-and-publish, transformative, and open-access agreement types.
