This dataset contains payments made by UK higher education institutions for access to academic journals from ten publishers from 2010-2019. The data was obtained by sending Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to institutions through the website What Do They Know. The requests, and all original source data, can be found at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/stuart_lawson/requests. The total expenditure with these ten publishers from 2010-2019 was over £982 million. This includes some gaps in the data, so the true figure is almost certainly greater than £1 billion. The data was originally produced in three stages: - Data for 2010-14 was published at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1186832 - Data for 2015-16 was published at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4542433 - Data for 2017-19 was published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3828461 These three datasets contain direct links to the original FOI requests. The present dataset is a combination of these three datasets and contains no additional data.