Denmark enters new agreement with Taylor & Francis

Press Release 26. March 2024

With the new agreement, Universities Denmark reaches another milestone in their ambitions to open up access to the universities’ research, so that it benefits the whole of society.

After an intensive negotiation process, a particularly satisfactory agreement was reached with the publisher Taylor & Francis, covering a 5-year period. With the agreement, price increases for a broad portfolio of journals are avoided, and immediate free access (called Open Access) to the publisher’s version of Danish publications in Taylor & Francis’ scientific journals is ensured.

It is the fourth year in a row that the Royal Danish Library, on behalf of Universities Denmark, has successfully negotiated with one of the major international publishers. It has been a repeated demand that there must be Open Access to Danish research publications, and that the universities will not accept high price increases for reading access to other countries’ research publications.

“It is very good for Danish research that with the agreement with Taylor & Francis we are taking the next step towards securing Open Access. A large proportion of research publications are still behind paywalls and we know that open access is an important piece in making research results widely available,” says University Director of Aarhus University, Kristian Thorn, who is also the negotiating representative for Universities Denmark, which provides the mandate in the license negotiations.

However, the efforts for free and open access are far from finished, a large part of the total global research results are still locked behind commercial paywalls. The scientific publishers profit from both publication and reading access. But Denmark has again achieved results that put an end to this business model, and brings Denmark a significant step forward in the effort for greater openness in research.

“In the spring of 2024, the Royal Danish Library will revisit the negotiation mandate in collaboration with Universities Denmark. We have taken important and big steps up to now – and we must definitely stick with that direction. But there is still a long way to go and we must deal with that – before we meet the big, international publishers again in the coming years” says chief negotiator Kira Stine Hansen, deputy director, Royal Danish Library.

https://pro.kb.dk/en/licensing/taylor-francis: Read more about the agreement and how you as a researcher can publish free Open Access with Taylor & Francis.