Nicholas Fraser, Anne Hobert, Najko Jahn, Philipp Mayr, Isabella Peters; No Deal: German Researchers’ Publishing and Citing Behaviours after Big Deal Negotiations with Elsevier. Quantitative Science Studies 2023; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00255
In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions. The authors investigated the effect on researchers’ publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ∼400,000 articles published by researchers at DEAL institutions between 2012–2020.