Your humble correspondent has been traveling some these last few weeks, and I apologize that I haven’t had a chance to post your weekly long-read in a while! But I’m back, and with a new read that, while not really a longread, per se, is certainly a timely one. In Pursuing a new kind of “big deal” with publishers, Lindsay McKinsey at Inside Higher Ed describes a public meeting hosted by the University of California libraries who have been engaged in one of the highest-profile fights over big deals in the US in a long time. I have my concerns about the whole “transformative agreement” project, but it is clearly an important phenomenon to watch.