Are Libraries Violating Procurement Rules?

Publicly funded institutions commonly have to obey strict spending rules. In a generalized version of this practice, members of such a public institution can only buy goods/services without first obtaining several competitive quotes,if these items are either covered by an existing institutional contract or theirprice does not exceed certain limits. Above a secondpricethreshold, limited bidding/tender processes are required and above athird, a full bidding process is mandated. At academic institutions, researchers can be excused for getting the impression only they are bound by these spending rules, as,e.g., libraries (alone or in consortia) just negotiate prices with, say, publisherswithout any such strings. However, this is mainly for historical reasons, as publishers own a copyright monopoly on the subscription content they used to offer (or are still offering), such that they fell under the "single source exemption" from spending rules. Today, however, many publishers either offer publication services for which they charge “article processing charges” (APCs) or have entered into "transformative agreements" (TAs) with an APC component and where the goal is a complete transition to APC-based publication services. One of the main reasons behind this transformation in scholarly publishing was to break out of the vendor lock-in the publisher monopolies entailed and replace it with a competitive APC market. If this market became indeed competitive, there cannot be a "single source exemption" any more to justify negotiations with publishers. If, on the other hand, libraries and publishers agree that despite the transition from procuring content to APC-based publication services, the monopolies actually still persist, this agreement amounts to an admission of defeat: APC-based open access has failed to break up the vendor lock-in and is, instead, cementing the parasitic relationship that corporate publishers exert on academic institutions. Tender processes or defeat, which will it be?