“If the whole world switches to open access since the scholarly community wants this, it would be a world without subscriptions”

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“If the whole world switches to open access since the scholarly community wants this, it would be a world without subscriptions”

March 3, 2019 by 2012pharmaceutical

“If the whole world switches to open access since the scholarly community wants this, it would be a world without subscriptions”

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, UC, Berkeley, PhD’83, Editor-in-Chief, PharmaceuticalIntelligence.com – Open Access since 4/2012, 1,585,184 e-Readers, 5,503 articles. @AVIVA1950 is followed by 360 who’s Followers are 2.5 Millions

Why did UC decide to end negotiations today?

Elsevier made a new, quite complex, but novel proposal to us at the end of January. On Monday, our negotiating team gave them a written response outlining our appreciation for Elsevier’s effort, but saying that conditions had to be met for us to sign a contract, and that we thought we were pretty far apart. We knew if they couldn’t accommodate us, there was not much point in continuing to negotiate at this time.

Elsevier wanted to keep meeting with us, and we have a meeting scheduled for tomorrow (Friday), but yesterday they approached our faculty directly — faculty who are editors of Elsevier journals, who they have working relationships with — and also the media, and presented a rosy view of the offer they’d made to us. Their characterization of the offer left things out, and they didn’t mention what we’d proposed as conditions. They went public with it. So, we announced the end.

We knew all along it was going to be difficult for Elsevier to change its ways to our satisfaction. We had hoped they’d see the light, that the publishing industry is changing, and that they could help lead the way.

What did each side want the most, and why?

From the very beginning, we had two goals: a reduction in costs — we pay about $11 million a year to Elsevier in subscription fees, which is 25 percent of UC system-wide journal costs — and default open access publication for UC authors: that is, that Elsevier would publish an author’s work open access unless the author didn’t want to. This is consistent with the UC faculty senate’s goal of all work being published open access.

We also wanted a contract that integrated a paid subscription with open access publishing fees. It would have been a transformative agreement, one that would shift payments for reading journal articles into payments for publishing them, and publishing them open access.

Elsevier eventually offered to do something like what we wanted, for open access, but they wanted to charge us a lot more. Our current calculations are that they would have increased the amount of our payments by 80 percent — an additional $30 million over a three-year contract.

Open access would eventually mean fewer subscriptions for Elsevier. But we don’t think they would lose, in the long run, by charging for publishing rather than by charging for reading. The transition the industry is making to open access is a feasible path forward, so that more universities don’t cancel their licenses for the same reasons we did.

If the whole world switches to open access, which we think it will at some point since the scholarly community wants this, it would be a world without subscriptions. But it would be a world where people would still want and need to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, and there’s always a cost for that.

Berkeley’s University Library was a key player in negotiations with Elsevier. (Photo by J. Pierre Carrillo for the University Library)

Have other universities made the same decision?

In the U.S., we’re the first university system to do this with open access as the main issue.

But all of the universities in Germany canceled two years ago for the same reason. The Max Planck Society (the leading research organization in Germany) also did. The university alliance in Sweden canceled last spring, and the university alliance in Hungary canceled in December. Several other national alliances in Europe are trying to negotiate a similar contract with Elsevier.

Is this a goal of UC, to be a model institution for open access?