Australian and New Zealand universities are teaming up to strike better open access deals with research publishers, in one of the first tests of how an alliance model could unlock more taxpayer funded work.
The unified position will improve bargaining power against major publishers in upcoming negotiations and is expected to result in a greater volume of research making it to open access next year.
“Major academic publishers regularly post profit margins of 30-40 per cent,” Deakin University Librarian Hero Macdonald told InnovationAus.com.
“The academic community are rightly concerned about what is often described as an exploitative business model, where academics write and peer review for free but are still charged arguably unjustifiable fees to both read and publish.”
Hero Macdonald chairs the Council of Australian University Librarians’ (CAUL) content procurement committee.
The CAUL, Universities Australia and Universities New Zealand – Te Pōkai Tara will represent the sector in the upcoming negotiations amid mounting pressure on university budgets and a growing push toward open access.
CAUL has already negotiated open access deals for thousands of articles through Read & Publish agreements.
But most research, including more than 60 per cent of all Australian journal articles published in the last 15 years, still sits behind paywalls and 90 per cent of Australians institutions’ spend with publishers is for subscriptions.
New ways to increase open access gained attention last year when the then Australian chief Scientist Cathy Foley proposed a radical public access model that would use national agreements.
Dr Foley’s public access model would cost up to $452 million annually – an extra $90 million on current costs – and make almost every journal article in the world free to every Australian.
It was put forward as an innovation and economic driver, with supporting modelling finding it would deliver an economic uplift of up to $2.3 billion in GDP growth and up to 1,000 new jobs over an eight-year period.
But the Albanese government has not acted on the advice in two years and now has a new chief scientist and Science minister.
Hero Macdonald said it is clear that widespread open access can be a productivity and innovation driver, but the sector also needs to get more value from publishers right away.
“It is CAUL’s view is that in addition to increasing open access, we must simultaneously address the unsustainable costs associated with much open access publishing and negotiate agreements that represent fairer value for our region,” they said.
The CAUL has championed open access for almost two decades and the council struck its first read and publish open access agreements in 2019.
“Since then CAUL has steadily been building its portfolio of open access agreements which now see nearly 25000 articles published openly that would otherwise have been behind a paywall which adds incredible value back to our community and the taxpayer,” Hero Macdonald said.
The new alliance will be used to strike more valuable agreements in upcoming negotiations with publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis.
“Our focus for this round of negotiations is maximising open access publishing, while also ensuring the sector – and therefore, the taxpayer – pays a reasonable and fair price for the services provided by major commercial publishers,” Hero Macdonald said.
The negotiations are continuing throughout 2025 and new agreements will begin from 2026.
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