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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 15 2020, @05:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday February 15 2020, @09:21PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 15 2020, @09:21PM (#958604) Journal

    Yeah. But if I'm remembering correctly Elsevier is the company that took money to print a journal for the pharmacological industry that hid the fact that all the reviewers were paid for by one particular company.

    Having the name Elsevier on it doesn't raise my level of trust anymore. Each journal has to stand on it's own, and face the competition separately.

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