Wiley announced its intent to enter a new five-year agreement with the DEAL Consortium, a countrywide consortium representative of more than 1,000 academic institutions in Germany, commencing January 2024. Wiley and DEAL are creating a blueprint for the next phase of open access publishing to better meet the evolving needs of the scholarly community. Their new agreement will continue to provide authors at German institutions with open access publishing options across Wiley’s portfolio. This includes read access to all Wiley journal content. Importantly, the new agreement will deliver ever-more benefits for the German research system by: *Supporting institutions in the transition to OA and honoring the immense value learned societies bring to the scholarly community. *Recognizing the unique investment needs of journals that deliver multiple forms of impact to their researcher communities. *Enhancing infrastructure, including robust workflows to support authors, readers, and librarians, as well as approval and oversight for administrators for OA articles. *Supporting participating institutions with bespoke training and deepening collaboration with the well-established Wiley DEAL Advisory Board to monitor success.

Publishers who mail newspapers have until July 1 to start cross-strapping bundles that go through mail processing, the Wisconsin Newspapers Association has reminded members. The goal of the U.S. Postal Service is to diminish bundle breakage during mail processing, the association states. The USPS will require “all bundles of flats to have two or more cross-strapped bands or be shrink-wrapped with one or more cross-strapped bands except for newspapers that are place in a flat tray and entered as exceptional dispatch,” the USPS announced in March.

Keep US Posted — a nonprofit advocacy group of consumers, nonprofits, newspapers, greeting card publishers, magazines, catalogs and small businesses — is warning Americans that stamp prices are set to increase on July 9 for the second time in 2023, and cautioning that if such unprecedented and excessive postage increases continue, Americans could be facing a government bailout of the U.S. Postal Service. The July increase marks the third such increase in 12 months — the most mailing rates have increased during the U.S. Postal Service’s 247-year history. Yoder continued, “DeJoy’s stated intent has been to use stamp increases to bring in additional revenue, yet each hike drives down mail demand at a progressively faster rate and increases internal costs, meaning less revenue for USPS, no matter how much more a stamp costs. The result is additional strain on the system. Congress passed bipartisan postal reform in 2022 intending to prevent these excessive postage increases by bringing financial solvency to the Postal Service but USPS, under DeJoy’s leadership, has plowed ahead with pre-planned stamp increases, which will continue every six months. The American people need Congress to step in now and bring additional oversight to the USPS rate strategy, otherwise we could be looking at a situation where a federal bailout is necessary."