No Deal: Investigating the Influence of Restricted Access to Elsevier Journals on German Researchers' Publishing and Citing Behaviours

Abstract

In 2014 the Alliance of Science Organisations (Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen), a union of the majority of German research organisations, established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between the DEAL consortium and Elsevier, one of the world's largest scientific publishers, began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their existing license agreements with Elsevier, leading to Elsevier shutting off access to their journal portfolios at those institutions from July 2018 onwards. We aimed to assess the effect of Elsevier access restrictions on the publishing and citing behaviour of researchers from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ~410,000 articles published by researchers from those affected institutions. Our early results show Elsevier’s market share of articles published by researchers from DEAL institutions has fallen over the past 5 years, from a peak of 25.3% in 2015 to 20.6% in 2020; the largest year-on-year loss in market share (>1%) was reported in 2020. Despite a reduction in the proportion of articles published in Elsevier journals, researchers at DEAL institutions have continued to cite Elsevier articles following access restrictions in similar proportions to before, suggesting that researchers use other methods to access and read articles (e.g. interlibrary loans, sharing between co-authors, or “shadow libraries” such as Sci-Hub). We further investigated these behaviours with respect to the timing of contract expirations, research disciplines, collaboration patterns and article OA status. Overall, we find some evidence of reduced willingness amongst researchers at DEAL institutions to publish in Elsevier journals, but no evidence suggesting that researchers are negatively affected in their ability to cite articles following restricted access to those journals.