The data from the German Library Statistics (DBS) reveals a clear trend: while spending on Closed Access content in university libraries in Germany has remained relatively stable, investments in Open Access have surged dramatically. Please note that not all universities reported all values consistently, making it impossible to quantify the trends with complete precision. However, clear trends can still be identified.
At the end of the post, you will also find a link to the Excel file I used for the analysis.
Let’s look at the numbers:
Spending on digital Closed Access content
- 2018: €153,818,679
- 2024: €157,462,777
= an increase of 2.37%
The data on subscription licenses are recorded in field 151, where, according to the documentation, the following values are collected:
“Digital / electronic media include the documents listed under (110) to (121) and (131) to (138). The expenditures for these media are to be reported here if they were incurred for the purchase or licensing of content, or for institutional shares in consortial and/or lump-sum agreements without an Open Access component. However, if the expenditures were related to Open Access publications, they are to be reported under (151.1) and (151.2). Fields (151.1) and (151.2) also include all expenditures arising from transformative agreements.”
Spending on Open Access (OA)
This includes Gold OA, transformative Hybrid OA, Diamond OA (consortially funded and outside the institution), and support for Open Access infrastructures (such as the Directory of Open Access Journals):
- 2018: €6,213,409
- 2024: €100,445,670
= an increase of 1,516.6%
These data are recorded in field 151.1, which is defined in the documentation as follows:
“This includes expenditures for Open Access publications and transformation efforts not published at the institution itself (e.g., via a repository or institutionally operated publishing platforms): all expenditures for Gold or Hybrid APCs and BPCs (excluding printing, translation, and incidental costs), crowdfunding for journal or book packages (e.g., pledging via Knowledge Unlatched), Subscribe-to-Open models, Open Access consortia (e.g., SCOAP3, KOALA, PLOS Community Action Publishing). Also to be reported are expenditures for external Open Access / Open Science infrastructures (e.g., DOAJ, arXiv, SciPost, Open Library of Humanities) that are not necessarily tied to specific publications, but excluding expenditures for Open Access / Open Science infrastructures operated by the institution itself. This category also includes all expenditures related to transformative agreements / publisher contracts with both subscription and Open Access components / Publish & Read agreements (regardless of whether they involve hybrid or gold OA, and regardless of whether they include reading or publishing fees). Transformative agreements include all contracts listed in the ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry (https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/agreement-registry) under which expenditures were incurred in the reporting year, as well as other comparable agreements with an OA component.”
Since 2024, a new field 151.2 has also included the following expenditures, which I am not analyzing here in order to maintain comparability across the time series: “This question is a subset of question 151.1. It does NOT refer to question 151. This includes all expenditures related to DEAL agreements that are invoiced by the DEAL consortium office (MPDL Services), including costs for Gold Open Access, service fees, and VAT. Expenditures from all other transformative agreements are recorded under field (151.1).”
However, this sharp rise in Open Access spending must be interpreted in context. While the increase in subscription (Closed Access) costs has been moderate, the explosion in OA-related expenditures is closely tied to transformative agreements, fueled by the first DEAL agreements (the first one with Wiley started in 2019), followed by others with the same and other publishers. These high-volume contracts shifted large parts of the cost from the Closed Access side to the Open Access side of the accounting.
As the graph below shows, Open Access expenditures rose sharply in 2024, most likely due to the renewal of the DEAL agreements with Springer Nature and Wiley, and especially the conclusion of the contract with Elsevier, which marked the end of the boycott by German universities.
This development illustrates a major transformation in scholarly publishing: Open Access is no longer a peripheral issue. It has become a central, structured element in the financial and strategic planning of academic libraries in Germany. Nevertheless, Closed Access expenditures still significantly outweigh Open Access expenditures in 2024.
It would have been interesting to analyze the full-time series starting in 2016 to explore the extent to which the Elsevier boycott, initiated in 2016 with the first contract cancellations and by 2018 embraced by nearly all universities, affected Closed Access expenditures. However, querying the database for this period was not straightforward, so I am now providing the figures for Closed Access subscriptions for the years 2015–2017.
According to the DBS data, the expenditures reported in this field changed little between 2015 and 2017.
- 2015: €144,764,563.00
- 2016: €159,736,477.00
- 2017: €149,876,569.00
As mentioned above, the value in 2018 was €153,818,679, indicating that the Elsevier boycott had no significant impact on subscription expenditures.
Data:
Original data from the DBS (including missing values):
Open Access and Closed Access 2018-2025
Closed Access 2015-2017
DBS data used for the analysis:
Open Access and Closed Access 2018-2025
Closed Access 2015-2017