After 5 years without access to Elsevier''s core journals, Germany returns The German university library consortium, Project DEAL, announced that it has signed a 5-year scientific journal open access publishing agreement with Elsevier. DEAL has also purchased the Backfile Collection, an Elsevier archive (2003-2022). A large Open Access Transformative agreement In exchange of a per-article charge German researchers within around 900 eligible institutions will be able to publish in more than 2500 of Elsevier''s journals as well as read all articles published worldwide. Per-article charges will vary according to the take-up of this agreement and the type of journal and roughly amount to EUR2500 per article in Hybrid journals (growing to over EUR2800 in 2028 with Cell and Lancet at EUR6450) and to a 20% discount on fully Gold OA journals. We believe these charges are consistent with the implied revenue per subscription article which we estimate at cEUR2800 currently. Agreement adds c1%pt to STM organic revenue growth in FY24 We estimate total annual contract revenues for Elsevier at cEUR30m but we believe that Elsevier has lost 5-10%pts of article share in Germany since 2018 when DEAL stopped subscribing. Including the EUR10m one-off backfile purchase and minor pre-existing revenues, we believe that this contract could add an incremental cEUR30m of revenues in FY24 and probably as much in terms of EBIT. That is an incremental c1% of STM organic revenue growth and 3% of STM EBIT translating into 30bps of orgrev growth at the group level in FY24 and 1% of group EBIT. A deal not in consensus and supportive of faster top line growth ahead We believe this contract was not in VA consensus forecast of 3.7% STM orgrev growth in FY24 and could trigger a c1% EPS upgrade. We also believe this announcement underpins the view that Elsevier is not only able to navigate through Open Access meanders but that like Legal, the STM division is likely to see top line...