The Impact of the German 'DEAL' on Competition in the Academic Publishing Market

Abstract

The German DEAL agreements between German universities and research institutions on the one side and Springer Nature and Wiley on the other side facilitate easy open access publishing for researchers located in Germany. We use a dataset of all publications in chemistry from 2016 to 2020 and apply a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact on eligible scientists' choice of publication outlet. We find that even in the short period following the conclusion of these DEAL agreements, publication patterns in the field of chemistry have changed, as eligible researchers have increased their publications in Wiley and Springer Nature journals at the cost of other journals. From that two related competition concerns emerge: First, academic libraries may be, at least in the long run, left with fewer funds and incentives to subscribe to non-DEAL journals published by smaller publishers or to fund open access publications in these journals. Secondly, eligible authors may prefer to publish in journals included in the DEAL agreements, thereby giving DEAL journals a competitive advantage over non-DEAL journals in attracting good papers. Given the two-sided market nature of the academic journal market, these effects may both further spur the concentration process in this market.

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

“…In the last 2-3 years in particular, Elsevier has lost considerable proportions of the OA market, likely driven by the successful conclusion of agreements between DEAL and other publishers (e.g. Springer Nature and Wiley; Haucap et al, 2021) and transfer of articles from DEAL researchers to those venues. Journals from the born-OA publishers…”

“…A complicating factor in our dataset is that we have included articles covering multiple research disciplines; we have already shown in Figure 2D that variation in publishing patterns exists on the institutional level, which may be a consequence of the individual institutions' research focuses. A recent analysis of the effect of the agreements made between DEAL and Springer Nature, and DEAL and Wiley (Haucap et al, 2021), chose to focus on a single discipline, Chemistry, with the justification that:…”

“…Our analysis covers a longer time period than that of Haucap et al (2021), and we assess effects covering the entire time period in which negotiations with Elsevier began in 2016, the time at which access was restricted in July 2018, and two subsequent publication years thereafter until the end of 2020. We therefore feel justified in including a broader range of disciplines in our approach with longer publishing timelines than Chemistry.…”

“…by new agreements made with publishers including Springer Nature and Wiley(Haucap et al, 2021).With respect to publishing patterns in Elsevier journals, the growth of OA has been relatively moderate compared to the overall picture in Germany: from 2012 to 2020 the total proportion of DEAL articles published in…”

Scholarly journals are sometimes regarded as substitutes even though each provides unique content

“…However, economists generally adopt a no‐substitution perspective with regard to scholarly journals—an assumption that because particular scholarly journals and full‐text databases are unique in their content, they cannot be regarded as substitutes (e.g., Edwards & Shulenburger, 2003; Grossmann & Brembs, 2019; Haucap et al, 2021; Tennant & Brembs, 2018). In this scenario, the scholar requires access to every relevant paper; access to a relevant paper in one journal does not reduce the need for other relevant papers in other journals.…”