INTERVIEW ‘‘
Universities are not keen to be outliers to their peer cohorts, which makes moving independently on some issues difficult. One of these areas is provision of journals. – David Prosser
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
No big deal
David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), explains some of the risks and opportunities the HE sector faces as more universities reject big publishing deals.
THE exact number of institutions that have rejected recently-negotiated ‘read and publish’ deals with the five biggest academic publishers has not been made public, but we do know the identity of some of those that have cho- sen not to sign up.
Some have rejected deals negotiated with Springer Nature, Wiley, Sage and Taylor & Francis, but most of the attention has been on the 10 universities that are known to have rejected the deal from Elsevier, the biggest academic publisher. These are Essex, Kent, Lancaster, London South Bank, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam, Surrey, Sussex, Swansea and York.
All of them have research departments, four of them – Lancaster, York, Sheffield, and Sussex – are members of Research Libraries UK (RLUK). Together they have been described as the “squeezed middle” – smaller research universities that are both teach- ing-focused and research-intensive.
No quick fix David Prosser, executive director of Research Librar- ies UK (RLUK), says: “The primary driver for most institutions has been the financial situation” and that most universities who could afford the deals were signing up to them.
Despite the attention given to the rejections, David believes they are not yet at a level to change or accelerate the current, ongoing shift to open access. He says: “There are no quick fixes. The vision is the continued shift towards open access. The vision is
April-May 2026
that there are some new models coming through. It’s just doing it very, very slowly. And for somebody who’s been an open access advocate for a long, long time that’s very frustrating.” He adds: “Universities are not keen to be outliers to their peer cohorts which makes moving inde- pendently on some issues difficult. One of these areas is provision of journals. And that’s why it’s taken this financial crisis to actually make the shift.” But turning this 10-strong rejection into something meaningful is what he hopes will happen. “I think people are looking at whether they can turn this from just being a purely financial decision into something that has wider benefits.” Sheffield, York and Surrey, which dropped the Elsevier read and publish deals last year, have already demonstrated that it is possible, according to David – but the question remains “how to build on that?”.
Call in the cavalry?
Whether they are using sector buying power to negotiate big deals or collaborating outside of these big deals, the challenge for independent institutions is how to find common goals and build enough trust to pursue them. David is sceptical about a top-down approach to steering universities toward particular content buying models. For a start RLUK is a mem- bership body and David says: “We could never say to our members ‘you must cancel Elsevier and you must subscribe to these journals’. But we are able to facili- tate the types of conversations needed, work through the practicalities and provide a framework through
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