About 200 universities in Germany will reportedly lose their subscriptions to Elsevier journals. According to Nature News reports, negotiations have failed to end a long-term contract dispute.
Academics in the country lost access to Elsevier content briefly earlier this year, but it was later restored while contract talks resumed.
Advocates of open-access publishing worldwide say that victory for the German universities would be a major blow to conventional models of scientific publishing based on subscription fees. Germany's firm stand in the battle to reduce subscription prices and promote immediate open access could herald profound changes to the global landscape of scholarly publishing, they say.
Negotiators with 'Project DEAL', a consortium of university libraries and research institutes, have been in talks with Elsevier for more than two years. They want a deal that would give most scientists in Germany full online access to 2,500 or so Elsevier journals, at about half the price that individual libraries have paid in the past. Open access is proving to be the sticking point in the talks. Under the deal sought, all corresponding authors affiliated with German institutions would be allowed to make their papers free to read and share by anyone in the world at no extra cost.
In September, a Finnish university consortium that sought a nationwide contract with Elsevier reached a preliminary understanding with the company after lengthy negotiations and a temporary strike by peer reviewers. Details of the agreement are yet to be disclosed, but sources say that it will include both reduced journal prices and permission for some articles by Finnish authors to be made freely available at no charge.
Gerard Meijer, a Dutch physicist now at the Max Planck Society's Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, was involved in negotiating open-access deals with Elsevier in the Netherlands in 2015. One deal allows scientists at 14 Dutch universities to make 30% of papers in selected journals open access without extra costs.
According to Hannfried von Hindenburg, a spokesman for Elsevier, some 19% of research articles published in 2016 that included a German author were published in an Elsevier journal. Germany is also negotiating an open-access deal with Springer Nature, Nature's publisher. In order to buy more time, both sides agreed in October to a one-year extension of all existing contracts that are due to end December 31, 2017.
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