University of California accounts for nearly 10% of all published research in the United States. It’s also a significant partner of Elsevier, which publishes about 18% of all UC output and collects more than 25% of the university’s $40-million overall subscription budget.
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
UPDATED on 2/17/2020
Open access journals get a boost from librarians—much to Elsevier’s dismay
Move to cut fees adds pressure to funding model already under strain.
Volunteers
Elsevier’s previous foot-dragging may be no surprise given the blessed commercial model of academic publishing. Typically scholars have submitted their research for free to publishers, who use volunteers to vet it, before selling the edited journals back, at a premium price, to the universities that footed the bill for the original scholarship.
While prominent funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have backed moves to open access publishing, some academics have worried it could prevent their work appearing in the most prestigious journals, an important factor in career assessment.
One of the old system’s weak points was the university libraries. Elsevier executives note that their content budgets simply failed to keep up with the 3 to 4 percent increases in research funding, or the even bigger increases in Elsevier’s workload and output: it received 1.8 million submissions last year for 470,000 articles. “Tensions resulting from these issues have eroded trust between scholarly publishers and the research community that we serve,” said Ms. Bayazit last month. She even offered an extraordinary apology to librarians still angry over double-digit price rises in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ivy Anderson, co-chair of the University of California’s publishing negotiations team, which cancelled its $11 million contract with Elsevier in March, said at the time that academics were “getting fed up with high prices and paywall journals, they’re standing up and saying we are willing to bear the inconvenience [of not having journal access]”.
UPDATED on 8/12/2019
High profile scientists from University of California are stepping down from the editorial boards of some of the most prominent scientific journals like Cell. A major blow to publisher Elsevier.
More than two dozen researchers at various University of California campuses have stepped back from their positions on the editorial boards of Elsevier journals, ScienceInsider reports.
The University of California and Elsevier have been at odds over subscriptions and open-access costs during their contract renewal negotiations. UC wanted a “read-and-publish” contract in which journal subscription and open-access publishing fees are combined, while Elsevier preferred to keep the current model. This led UC in March to announce it was not going to renew its contract with Elsevier. ScienceInsider notes that UC’s access to Elsevier journals was cut off in July.
According to ScienceInsider, about 30 UC researchers, including CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna and Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, are taking hiatuses from the editorial boards of a range of Elsevier journal, such as Cell, Molecular Cell, and Current Biology. “We … wish to express our concern at the current lack of a contract between UC and Elsevier, and the decision to deny our UC colleagues access to research published in Cell Press and other Elsevier journals,” the researchers write in a letter.
Berkeley’s Matthew Welch says in a statement that this move will not affect the journals much, but that it “sends a message.”
UPDATED on 3/2/2019
The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
The UC system just dropped its $10 million-a-year subscription to the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.
UPDATED on 1/7/2019
University of California and Elsevier Locked in Negotiations
The UC system is pushing to change the subscription model and accelerate open access, but if there’s no contract agreement by December 31, faculty and students lose access altogether.
Dec 13, 2018
CAROLYN WILKE
See “Dutch Universities, Journal Publishers Agree on Open-Access Deals”
See “Sweden Cancels Agreement With Elsevier Over Open Access”
SOURCE
Heavyweight Showdown Over Research Access
University of California System is playing hardball with Elsevier in negotiations that could transform the way it pays to read and publish research. But does the UC system have the clout to pull it off?
To facilitate this, the UC system is pursuing a new kind of arrangement with Elsevier and several other publishers, Anderson said. Rather than paying separately to access subscription journals and make articles immediately available in OA, the UC system wants to roll both costs into one annual fee, which could potentially be higher than what the UC system currently pays for subscriptions only.
This arrangement, called a “read-and-publish” deal, would mean that the public would have immediate, free access to final versions of UC research papers, with no additional article-processing fees to the UC system.
In pursuing such an arrangement with Elsevier, the UC system is “trying to fundamentally change the ecosystem of scholarly communication,” said Rick Anderson, associate dean for colleges and scholarly communications in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah.
Tananbaum said that what the UC system is trying to do is unusual. “Historically, libraries have been vocal in their dissatisfaction with the lock-in and spend associated with many forms of the big deal,” he said.
“In this instance, UC is not simply bemoaning the status quo; they are working proactively to change it,” said Tananbaum. “This effort is not limited to simply trying to hold the line on pricing. It also seeks to reset the university’s relationship with publishers, promoting a partnership approach to create a glide path to OA.”
Lisa Hinchliffe, professor and coordinator of information literacy services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that many institutions would be interested in read-and-publish deals if the terms were favorable to them.
“The concern is that any read-and-publish deal is likely to have a higher price than an institution’s current read deal,” said Hinchliffe. “Given that [article-processing charges] are usually not paid from a central fund, adding this expense to the library’s budget could be a challenge even if the overall cost to the institution declined as expenses were bundled.”
SOURCE
UC policy has been explicitly committed to open access since 2013, when the university’s Academic Senate adopted the policy. UC authors are required to deposit versions of their papers or links in the university’s eScholarship online repository, which currently holds more than 200,000 items available to the public for free. (Compliance by researchers is thought to be spotty as yet, however, in part because there’s no enforcement system.)
No one knows yet how the showdown between UC and Elsevier will play out. Some observers expect that the deadline will be extended so the two sides can continue negotiating, though Elsevier would have the right to shut off access to new journal issues as of Jan. 1. (Access to prior publications already paid for wouldn’t be affected.)
As for the longer time frame, the research community expects the big publishers to stay in business, but perhaps with narrower profit margins and an evolved model more reliant on preparation fees than subscriptions.
Researchers have begun to sense that they may have more leverage against the publishers than they assumed. “As authors, we do have a choice of where we send our articles and invest our time as peer reviewers,” Bales says. “If enough of the publishers’ customers end their subscriptions… they’ll have to change.”
SOURCE
In UC’s battle with the world’s largest scientific publisher, the future of information is at stake
by Michael Hiltzik
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-uc-elsevier-20181207-story.html
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Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
e-Scientific Publishing: The Competitive Advantage of a Powerhouse for Curation of Scientific Findings and Methodology Development for e-Scientific Publishing – LPBI Group, A Case in Point
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Editor-in-Chiefhttp://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
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