Read and Publish: Deals
Library and Learning Resources currently subscribes to several Read & Publish deals. These are negotiated at a national level between Jisc and key academic publishers.
If you have any questions about how we choose the deals, or why a particular publisher isn’t represented, please see here.
These deals give BCU staff and students read access to the publishers' material without buying individual subscriptions. They also allow BCU researchers to publish Gold Open Access articles in selected journals without paying Article Processing Charges (APCs).
All these deals have their own criteria and restrictions for publication. The common requirements are that you are the corresponding author and affiliated with BCU. Other than that, they cover different article and journal types. Please check the individual deal conditions before you submit your article.
If you're interested in a specific journal and you're not sure if it's covered, the Jisc Transitional Agreements Lookup Tool is a good place to start. First, enter Birmingham City University as your institution. Then enter the title, keywords or ISSN of the journal you are interested in. This will tell you the publisher and whether an agreement is in place. If there is, you can check the terms and conditions on the individual deal pages above.
Why these deals? Why not others?
Library Budget and Value for Money
The library budget is mostly reserved for buying access to learning resources. This means that we cannot spend money on individual APCs, or on deals from fully-OA publishers that only pay for publishing but not reading. We do have a small budget for supporting sustainable OA infrastructure, such as Subscribe-to-Open or Diamond OA. To learn more about this, and to find out why just paying APCs isn't considered sustainable, please see here.
To take out a new subscription, we need to justify how spending the money meets our users' needs. For instance, in 2019, we had several subscriptions with Cambridge University Press, and we knew these were well-used. We also had figures showing that 41% of attempts to access CUP journals ended with the user being turned away from something we didn't have, suggesting there was a large unmet need. When we cancelled the individual journals and used that money to pay for the R&P deal instead, we got access to a lot more journals as well as Gold OA publishing. By 2024, we could show the usage had tripled, and only 9% of attempts ended in turnaways.
The library is always open to suggestions for new subscriptions and e-resources using this form. We don't need or expect you to quote the kind of usage numbers above! The form will ask you to explain who needs the resource and what they need it for. Please contact your Library Business Partner if you need any help with this.
National Negotiations and Sector Needs
The R&P deals are all negotiated nationally between Jisc and the publishers. Because Jisc represent the entire UK HE sector, and have specialist legal and procurement staff, they can negotiate better terms than we can as an individual library. However, they are also limited by what the publishers will offer, and what the sector will vote to accept. This means that certain kinds of deal may simply not be available, either because the publishers didn’t offer, or the sector didn’t accept. It is possible that a potential deal may be good for us, but does not meet the needs of the rest of the sector, and is therefore voted down.
In the round of negotiations for post-2025 deals, Jisc have been focusing on the following sector needs:
- Reduced or frozen pricing (many HE libraries are facing budget cuts), with transparent rationales behind it and no extra fees
- Sustainable growth models not relying on an ever-increasing number of published articles
- Increased transition of journals to Open Access following Jisc's review of the previous agreements
- Improved participation and equity in scholarly publishing (using the How Equitable Is It? tool)
- Respecting author rights and choices regarding self-archiving (Green Open Access and the BCU institutional repository)
- Workflows that support and enable all of the above
Alternatives to R&P deals
If you need to publish OA (because of institutional or funder requirements), bear in mind that doesn't necessarily mean publishing Gold OA with an APC. Always double-check the policy to see what they specify. Putting the Author's Accepted Manuscript in the BCU institutional repository is usually fine.