Open Access means free access to scientific literature for all readers. The need for libraries to subscribe to paid journals for their readers will become obsolete in the future. Instead, financing models based on the number of publications of an institution are becoming increasingly common.

As an intermediate step on this path, library consortia and publishers have concluded transformation agreements or so-called publish-and-read agreements in recent years. The aim of these agreements is for the institutions involved in these contracts not only to provide their members with comprehensive read access to scientific literature, but also to enable them to publish Open Access.

The DEAL agreements are the best-known agreements of this kind and were negotiated by the Alliance of Scientific Organizations with the publishers Wiley (since 2019), Springer Nature (since 2020) and Elsevier (since 2023). More than half of all scientific publications in Germany are published by these three publishers.

HTWD has decided to join all three DEAL agreements in order to ensure a comprehensive supply of information for its members on the one hand and to simplify Open Access publishing on the other. Find out more about the DEAL agreements and other publish-and-read agreements at HTWD below.