DEAL is an initiative of the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany with the goal to conclude nationwide licensing agreements for the entire portfolio of electronic journals from major academic publishers. The intention is to bring about significant change to the status quo in relation to negotiations, content and pricing in the process and to achieve wide-scale, lasting improvements in open access to scholarly literature. The first agreement with a major publisher was signed on January 15, 2019 – after a long series of negotiations. I am a member of the DEAL negotiation team and will report on the whole range of plans and challenges as well as my expectations for future development.