The University of California system is currently negotiating the potential renewal of its contracts with scholarly journal publishers, including Elsevier. The Elsevier contract will expire on December 31, 2018. The UC is advocating for an integrated agreement with Elsevier that would cover both subscription charges and open access publishing fees, making open access the default for any article published by a UC author.
If UC does not reach an agreement with Elsevier, Elsevier may turn off access to articles published on or after January 1, 2019, as well as to a small number of journals for which UC does not have perpetual access rights. In this case, the UCR Library will provide alternative means of access to users as they do for any other content that it does not currently license. More information will be available immediately if this situation occurs.
In 2017 UC paid Elsevier more than $10 million for access to fewer than two thousand journals, and UC authors paid nearly $1 million on top of that in article publishing fees for open access or hybrid journals. In addition, many campus units subscribe to Elsevier's non-journal research tools, bringing the total annual system wide spend to more than $11.5 million.
Given that the University of California accounts for nearly 10 percent of all US publishing output - more than any other public educational institution in the nation - in a larger sense, the UC is paying even more. Countless UC faculty members and researchers publish in Elsevier journals, review manuscripts for those journals, or serve on the journals' editorial boards.
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