The University of California recently lost access to new articles in the publishing giant Elsevier’s journals.
This is reportedly the latest development in the ongoing negotiations between Elsevier and the University of California (UC) for a new licensing agreement. UC’s previous contract with the publisher lapsed at the end of 2018. The university has since then been urging for a deal that combines payments for accessing journals and publishing open-access articles into one fee.
Earlier in February, after eight months of negotiations without a deal, UC terminated its subscriptions with Elsevier. Until this week, the publisher had been providing UC with continued access to its journals. However, UC is no longer able to access papers published since the beginning of 2019. Access has also been restricted for some older articles in select journals.
According to Jessica Nusbaum, the director of communications and marketing at UC Davis Library, UC’s prior contracts provided permanent access to the vast majority of pre-2019 content.
According to Gemma Hersh, Elsevier’s senior vice president of Global Research Solutions, UC’s decision to cancel subscriptions will impact 350,000 researchers and students who will no longer have convenient access to much of the world’s best scientific literature.
In a recently released statement, UC’s Academic Council encouraged those at the university who might require access to Elsevier’s content to use alternative access methods, such as online repositories where authors deposit free-to-read copies of their papers, and to 'refrain from any new independent subscriptions to Elsevier journals.'
Over the last few months, Elsevier has established nationwide licensing agreements in Norway and Poland, and is close to making such a deal in Hungary. However, it remains in a stalemate in negotiations with consortia of libraries and research institutions in Germany and Sweden. Those groups have also cancelled their subscriptions with the publisher.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
