do with content. They will unilaterally say ‘this is our AI policy now’ and that’s not necessarily covered by the contract and it’s debatable whether or not it’s covered by text and data mining exceptions. But they suddenly appear and so the best you can do as a community is to push back against that and to say that they are unacceptable. Like many businesses, publishers try it on and you have to be vigilant and push back.” He adds: “One of the interesting things as we work through this process, will be what sort of offers publishers make to people who have left the big deals. And whether they are going to price things in a way that make it difficult for people to move away from big deals. I think this is an area where you could imagine a competition regulator wanting to ensure that publishers weren’t tying libraries into big deals and there were genuine alternatives.”
Sustain diversity
“For those who have already moved away from big deals, they don’t seem to have felt significant disadvantages,” says David. “There are other routes to getting access like inter library loans and individual subscriptions. And there are also other open-compliant publication routes to en- sure that academics aren’t being hampered in their choice of where to publish. So, the move away from big deals is not as trau- matic as some people feared that it would
University of Edinburgh.
to accept the shift from the instant access they have become used to. Interlibrary loan can be very quick – providing papers with delays of no more than a couple of hours – but does that feel unacceptably long? Is not having instant access a real disadvantage or just a perceived disadvantage?” He also hopes life outside the big deals will flourish, saying: “Universities who have rejected deals are now looking at how they can reinvest some of those savings in other forms of publishing, working with other, more innovative publishers, looking to support open access. It’s creating this greater diversity within the environment and it’s allowing some libraries to look at whether they can experiment. We need to look at some of the opportunities as well as just seeing it all as one big threat.” IP
be. I don’t think it will have a long-term negative effect on the ability to do research, because there are these alternative routes – you can still get access to the research that you need.”
But he says that this may be tested: “The question is whether academics will be able
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Universities who have rejected deals are now looking at how they can reinvest some of those savings in other forms of publishing...
Health Sciences Library study group area, University of Leeds. April-May 2026 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 17
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