Thousands of scientists in Germany, Peru and Taiwan are set to lose online access to journals from the Dutch publisher Elsevier. Contract negotiations in both Germany and Taiwan broke down in December, while Peru's government has cut off funding for a licence.
Universities regularly complain about the rising costs of academic journals, and sometimes threaten to cancel their subscriptions. But negotiators usually strike a deal to avoid cutting researchers off. Last year, for example, a consortium of 14 universities in the Netherlands threatened to boycott Elsevier if it could not agree that articles by Dutch authors would be made open access. In the end, it thrashed out a compromise: 30% of its Dutch papers will be open access by 2018. And this month, a Finnish consortium that could not agree on terms with major publishers including Elsevier settled for a one-year extension deal while talks continue.
In Germany, the DEAL consortium was supposed to broker its first nationwide licence agreement for the beginning of 2017. It wants all German-authored articles to be made open access. According to Horst Hippler, spokesperson for the DEAL consortium of state-funded universities and research organizations, which is overseeing negotiations in Germany, Elsevier's proposed contract cost too much, and didn't include an open-access clause. Negotiations ended in December without agreement; Hippler says they are likely to resume in January.
Before the DEAL collective formed, German institutions had negotiated their own contracts with Elsevier individually. Hundreds of universities are still on multi-year individual contracts, so are not yet affected.
But for more than 60 institutions, access licences ran out at the end of 2016. In October, assuming that a nationwide deal would be struck, they decided not to automatically renew. Now, academics in those institutions are set to lose access: in some cases only to articles published from the start of 2017 onwards, but in others, to archived issues too. The affected institutions could choose to renew their individual licences, but seem content to ride out the lack of access while DEAL negotiations continue.
In Taiwan, meanwhile, more than 75% of universities, including the country's top 11 institutions, have joined a collective boycott against Elsevier, says Yan-Jyi Huang, library director at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST, also known as Taiwan Tech).
On December 7, the Taiwanese consortium, CONCERT, which represents more than 140 institutions, announced it would not renew its contract with Elsevier because fees were too high. Elsevier switched to dealing with universities individually. But the NTUST and many others — including Taiwan’s leading research institute, Academia Sinica — have each decided to uphold the boycott, from January 1, 2017.
In Peru, researchers are also set to lose online access to Elsevier's Science Direct and Scopus platforms from 2017 because of a lack of government funding. But some scientists there say that it is not a problem, because they can get the papers they need illegally from the Sci-Hub website.
Reasons for Peru's government for not providing the funds to its National Council for Science, Technology and Technological Innovation (CONCYTEC) for access to Elsevier's products is not clear. CONCYTEC announced the problem on December 14, but declined to comment on why funding was cut off.
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