New offers from big five ‘still too costly’ for UK universities

‘Significant’ number of institutions predicted to drop deals with main scholarly imprints, leaving journal access much reduced

Published on
October 23, 2025
Last updated
October 23, 2025
Jack Grove
Visitors looking at books at a book fair, with a large image of water pouring out of a book. To illustrate that a number of institutions are predicted to drop deals with main scholarly imprints due to being to costly.
Source: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
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Reader's comments (5)

#1 Submitted by ... on October 23, 2025 - 11:23am
Tge access to research materials aughabke anyway. Hourly paid faculty dont have access to SCONUL so unless they have access t the British library they will have a tough time. Paying £35 fir an article s a ad joke. As a humanities scholar with a high research profile in book publishing but no faculty job i refuse to publish in journals
#2 Submitted by ... on October 25, 2025 - 8:55am
Publishing books that are not open access is actually not helping the availability of material across the world. I suggest you also look at community-led Open Access journals where there are no fees.we are there to help.
#3 Submitted by m.... on October 23, 2025 - 11:50am
The profit margins of the "Big Five" are absolutely insane - and far higher than pretty much any industry you care to name, including common "villains" like big pharma. Boycott the lot.
#4 Submitted by andy.... on October 23, 2025 - 7:56pm
Absolutely. The cost of distribution has essentially gone to zero since the www. The content, review, and editorial organisation are done, almost entirely for free by academics, who can self organise on platforms like SciPost and (bio)arXiv. We have ourselves to blame as a sector if we waste £100m+ per year on content _we_ and our ilk generated and chose to let someone else monetize. Ridiculous system, time for it to expire.
#5 Submitted by ... on October 25, 2025 - 8:53am
The pricing is way too high. Come and join us in the community led Open Access movement, where we volunteer a little bit of our time to edit and run journals. I have become a professor, perhaps a little bit later than others, while successfully avoiding the big five for many years now. This is what the Cost of Knowledge campaign launched by Sir Tim Gowers was all about back in the early 2010s. And the DORA declaration, which my own University has actually signed up to.

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