Throughout 2025, the UK higher education and research sector, in collaboration with Jisc, will negotiate with the largest five academic publishers in the UK: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Wiley, and Sage. These negotiations aim to achieve fair, equitable, sustainable, and affordable agreements that meet the evolving needs of UK universities and the research community.
Through Jisc, the University of Essex are contributing to these negotiations wherever possible. It is in our interests both financially and ideologically for there to be a reset of the UK's current open access agreements. We will be consulting with academic colleagues wherever appropriate throughout these negotiations, and will communicate any updates as and when they become available.
Progress so far:
Upcoming key dates:
For more information on the approach, aims, and current progress of negotiations, please head to Jisc's "Next Generation Open Access" page. If you would like to discuss this further, we'd be happy to hear from you via oapublish@essex.ac.uk.
Ensuring open access to research publication is a key priority for UK universities and research funders. In recent years, this priority has begun to be mandated immediately on publication by research funders via cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is part of cOAlition S, and is therefore committed to cOAlition S' principles for achieving full and immediate access to publicly funded research. These principles are known as Plan S. The UKRI's open access policy reflects Plan S, illustrating and contributing toward a shift in the UK publishing landscape to immediate open access publication.
Alongside this, Jisc, as representatives of the UK Universities' sector, have been negotiating agreements with academic publishers that allow UK researchers to publish their work open access in a way that is more cost-efficient and straight-forward. These agreements aim to reduce institutional spend with academic publishers, whilst increasing the amount of UK research that is published open access.
This page gives a summary of, and provides updates on, current and past negotiations with academic publishers around open access publishing.
Following extensive negotiations led by Jisc, Essex researchers can now benefit from a three-year read and publish deal with Springer Nature. This deal includes:
Full details are available on our open access publishing page.
Read access to Springer content remains unchanged by this deal.
For an explanation of the journal partitioning at Springer Nature, see the Springer Nature website.
Over the past few years, the UK Universities sector negotiated with academic publishing giant Elsevier to reduce subscription costs for Universities, and to ensure full and immediate open access to UK research published by Elsevier.
On 23 March 2022, these negotiations were announced as successful, meaning Essex researchers now benefit from a read and publish deal with Elsevier that complies with cOAlition S funder requirements. These requirements mandate that publicly funded research be publicly available to everyone, for free.
The new agreement provides unlimited open access publishing for Essex researchers in eligible Elsevier subscription journals, including the Lancet and Cell Press titles. The agreement also allows for a discount on APCs for Elsevier’s fully gold open access titles, as well as a price cap on APC price increases. Finally, the agreement provides a reduction on subscription spend to all UK universities.
As a University, we support this publication model, and provide resources on open access publishing in our open access guide, and in the University's open access guidance.
