Following months of hard negotiation by Jisc’s Content Negotiation Strategy Group, the library sector has reached an agreement with Springer Nature.
It meets many of the objectives set by the sector on open access, constraining costs and rights retention and it should be applauded for this, it is the best that could be achieved in the policy and cultural climate we are operating in currently.
Despite this, there is a bitter taste left in the mouth by this deal and the library community has expressed significant reservations. For example, we are still not any clearer on transparent costs for article processing charges but more fundamentally, the agreement replicates the models that have been established for read and publish in a transformative agreement age.
The question now is, what next?
