“In July, I will retire from UC Davis, after more than a decade serving as University Librarian and Vice Provost of Digital Scholarship.
A significant focus of my tenure at UC Davis has been advancing free and open access to information — both research and, for our students, affordable course materials….”
Abstract: In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions. We investigated the effect on researchers’ publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ?400,000 articles published by researchers at DEAL institutions between 2012–2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier’s market share of articles from DEAL institutions, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occuring from 2018 to 2020 following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations, although the decrease is smaller. We conclude that negotiations with Elsevier and access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness to publish in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, implying that researchers use other methods to access scientific literature.
Abstract: This study investigates how article downloads from ScienceDirect changed after Temple University Libraries downsized its all-inclusive Elsevier big deal bundle to a selective custom package. After the libraries lost current-year access to nearly half of Elsevier’s active journals, the total downloads from Elsevier journals declined by 16.2 percent over three years. Combined use of still-subscribed and open access journals fell 10.6 percent in the same three years, suggesting that the drop in total use is due not only to the loss of journals but also to factors that would affect the remaining journals, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a slight decrease in enrollment. Patrons may have substituted articles from still-subscribed and open access journals for those that were canceled, though the data are not conclusive. Reliance on open access appears to have increased.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
Abstract: When breaking out of ‘big deals’, some libraries and consortia have found that they can save money by negotiating away post-cancellation access (PCA) to subscribed resources after the subscription concludes. Using subscription data regarding major publisher contracts at several US research libraries, this article reviews options around PCA for libraries and presents a model for assigning a value to PCA content when negotiating a renewal contract.
“On Nov. 17, 2022, University of Oregon Executive Vice President Janet Woodruff-Borden said UO will pause its subscription journal package with Elsevier Publishing Company at the end of 2022 in an email announcement….
UO partnered with Oregon State University and Portland State University, who also subscribe to Elsevier’s journal package, to negotiate prices with Elsevier. All three universities ended their subscriptions after failing to reach an agreement….
The three universities were looking to cut the cost of each of their subscription packages by 50%, which Elsevier was aware of going into negotiations, Bowman said….
Part of the disagreement between Elsevier and universities was that Elsevier was charging the same price, even though many of its articles were open access, Dave Fowler, a collection management librarian at UO, said. In other words, anyone could have access to certain Elsevier published content without paying a subscription to Elsevier….
Because of the contract lapse, students and faculty may experience delays in having access to requested Elsevier articles, Salaz said. “In the long term however, we are confident that students, researchers and scholars everywhere will benefit from a system that doesn’t exploit academic labor for excessive profit,” she said….”
“The University of Oregon’s contract with academic publisher Elsevier will be allowed to expire as the two sides have so far failed to reach an agreement on a new deal and negotiations have stalled.
The current contract with Elsevier expires Dec. 31. After that, the UO will no longer have access to new 2023 Elsevier-published subscription content.
The university will retain access to the content of 189 of the most used and subscribed journals that were published up to Dec. 31. The UO also will retain access to 609 journal back files with pre-1994 content that were purchased several years ago….”
“You have probably just read the Provost’s announcement that we are suspending our negotiations with Elsevier for the remainder of this year. We did not make this decision lightly. Our Elsevier contract represents more than one-fifth of our entire collections budget at OSU, and we know that this decision will be disruptive. We do think that this action is an important step towards the sustainable future we described, and the Faculty Senate affirmed, in our Principles Guiding Negotiations with Journal Vendors.
We are taking steps to ensure that everyone in our OSU community can continue to get the resources they need to do their work from the library. I’m going to outline some of these steps here, and I encourage you to consult this resource guide for more information. There you will find important background, information on using alternative services to access articles, and a FAQ about the Elsevier negotiations. Check back often, this resource guide will be regularly updated….”
“At $2.6M per year and an annual 2.5% increase, the Elsevier journal package is the most expensive annual expenditure for the University of Washington (UW) Libraries. For context, the total UW Libraries collections budget for the Seattle campus is approximately $16 million, and we spend about $13 million on ongoing subscriptions. Immediate access to 2,500 Elsevier journal titles published in the current year represent about 15% of the Libraries annual collections budget. Moreover, these high ongoing costs undermine the primary mission of the University of Washington — the preservation, advancement and dissemination of knowledge.
The Elsevier journal package reinforces the scholarly publishing model based on paywalls and rationing of access, inequitable opportunities for publishing, and excessive pricing and annual price increases that undermines a scholarly ecosystem where the open sharing of knowledge is critical to accelerating change for the public good. In spring 2022, the UW Faculty Senate voted to approve a Class C Resolution expressing its support for UW Libraries’ Principles in Licensing Scholarly Resources focused on the tenets of sustainability, access and equity, and support for scholarship and teaching. These principles guide negotiation priorities and empower the UW Libraries to discontinue negotiations that conflict with these principles. More importantly, the principles clearly articulate our intentions:
“We are shifting spending away from purchasing content from proprietary, closed, for-profit scholarly information providers and increasing investments to create and support community-owned infrastructure and shared digital resources.”
The negotiating team, comprised of UW faculty and librarians, began meeting with Elsevier during summer 2022, and communicated the UW Libraries fiscal realities (see Subscription Review 2020-21) and UW faculty contributions as authors of Elsevier articles (see FCUL 10/12 slide 7). The response and proposals received during our negotiations convey a commercial, proprietary, profit-seeking, and unsustainable relationship by Elsevier at the expense of UW.
As a result, the Libraries will be unable to maintain immediate access for all titles in our current list of 2,500 Elsevier journal titles on ScienceDirect. There is no choice but to begin identifying which journals need to be available for immediate access to meet patient care needs as well as long term use for research, teaching, and learning. The Libraries will continue to provide faculty, students and staff access to published articles through alternative access options such as PubMed Central, Google Scholar, and interlibrary loan — most requested articles are delivered within a few hours or business days….”
“OSU’s librarians, together with colleagues from the University of Oregon and Portland State University, have been working for several months to negotiate their respective contracts with Elsevier, one of the world’s most profitable scholarly information providers. I’m writing to provide an update on the status of those negotiations.
Upon the recommendation of the negotiations team, OSU is suspending negotiations for the remainder of this year. This means that as of January 1, 2023, OSU will no longer have immediate subscription access to Elsevier journals. We will take this action for the reasons outlined below. My provost and executive vice president colleagues at UO and PSU have each indicated they are taking similar action and will no longer have immediate subscription access to Elsevier journals at the new year for similar reasons….”