With the project DEAL the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) is negotiating on behalf of the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany with the big STEM publishers (Elsevier, SpringerNature und Wiley) about nation-wide agreements for licensing e-journals. The aims of DEAL are:

• Fair financial burden to get a wide-scale, lasting access to scholarly literature (e-journals) for academics in Germany.
• As open access component, corresponding authors’ publications of participitating institutions should be Open Access automatically (CC-BY).
• To bring about significant change to the status quo in relation to negotiations, content and pricing in the process of accessing scholarly information in Germany.

What does DEAL mean actually for the TUHH?

1. The TUHH has cancelled this year all journal subcriptions with the publishers Elsevier, Springer und Wiley to the end of 2018. The TUHH takes part at the project DEAL.
2. The situation at TUHH will be the same like at all other German universities which cancelled their subscriptions last year or the year before. The list of these institutions includes for example other universities of technology like those in Aix-La-Chapelle, Berlin, Braunschweig, Darmstadt, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe and Munich. In 2018 the TUHH has still had a regular contract with Elsevier because of a three-years-agreement starting 2016.
3. The status of the DEAL negotiations is open. Contracts with the publishers SpringerNature and Wiley seem to be more possible than a contract with the publisher Elsevier.

What does DEAL mean for the access to e-journals at TUHH in 2019?

• Starting 2019 the TUHH will still have access to journals, for which the TUHH had subscriptions with permanent archival rights, until including the volumes of the year 2018.

  For the publisher Elsevier as example this means:

  • Via ScienceDirect acccess will still be possible to the most important 48 journals, for which the TUHH has had a subscription until the year 2018.
  • No access will exist for articles of the year 2019.
  • No access will be possible to other ScienceDirect journals. Here the access for 2018 has been paid by an annual license without permanent access rights.
  • Further on you also have access to the Elsevier Journal Backfiles on ScienceDirect 1907 – 2002, a package, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as national license for Germany years ago.

   

• For getting articles not available in digital or printed form at the TUHH, you have – as in the moment also – in 2019 the following possibilities:
  • Ordering through interlibrary loan online: In the moment you get a paper copy normally within one week. In the future, maybe it will be possible in most cases to deliver a digital copy to end-users.
  • Ordering through other document delivery services: In case you need an article within 24 hours or within 3 working days, the TUHH library will order the articles for TUHH researchers through another delivery service, for which the library will also pay for. This is possible already today on request.
  • In general, document delivery is possible via various ways of acquisition, which differ in the speed of supply (from at once to several days), in the quality of supply (from original pdf file to paper copy) and in the fees to be paid (to about 75 € for the most expensive type of document delivery).