California universities and Elsevier make up, ink big open-access deal:
Two years after a high-profile falling out, the University of California (UC) system and the academic publishing giant Elsevier have patched up differences and agreed on what will be the largest deal for open-access publishing in scholarly journals in North America. The deal is also the world's first such contract that includes Elsevier's highly selective flagship journals Cell and The Lancet.
The deal meets demands made by UC when it suspended negotiations with Elsevier in 2019. It allows UC faculty and students to read articles in almost all of Elsevier's more than 2600 journals, and it enables UC authors to publish articles that they can make open access, or free for anyone to read, by paying a per-article fee. Elsevier says it will discount those open-access fees, and UC says it will subsidize their authors.
UC estimates the new deal will cost its libraries' budget 7% less than what they would have paid had it extended its old contract with Elsevier, which expired in December 2018. UC paid $11 million that year. But the university's total spending on the deal, including money from outside funding sources, could be higher than that, depending on how many articles it publishes open access, Elsevier says.
The impasse had been closely watched as a bellwether for whether U.S. universities would join what has become a worldwide push toward immediate open access to scientific articles. Elsevier is the largest scholarly journal publisher, and UC is among the top institutions in research spending. Their rapprochement reflects a recent shift in Elsevier's business strategy toward one friendlier to such deals, which other commercial publishers have been quicker to embrace. It also appeared to reflect the clout that UC's size affords: The 50,000 journal articles produced annually by researchers on its 10 campuses represent 10% of U.S. output.
[...] Observers are now watching to see whether Elsevier can reach a similar rapprochement with the 700-member Project DEAL consortium in Germany, which pulled the plug on its Elsevier subscriptions starting in 2017 because of an impasse over open access. A representative of the consortium said this week it is in informal talks with Elsevier, but negotiations have not officially resumed.
In the meantime, an even bigger question hangs over the global push for open access: whether enough universities and faculty members will choose to pay for open-access papers, or just continue to submit manuscripts to paywalled journals that don't charge a fee for publication.
Previously:
Open Access Journals Get A Boost From Librarians
Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users' Passwords Exposed Online
University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access
Related Stories
University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access:
The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced today that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide.
The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.
“It’s hard to overstate how big [UC’s move] is for us here in the U.S.,” says Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a Washington D.C.-based group that advocates for open access. “This gives institutions that are on the fence about taking this kind of action a blueprint.”
Indeed, UC’s move could ratchet up pressure on additional negotiations facing Elsevier and other commercial publishers; consortia of universities and labs in Germany and Sweden had already reached an impasse last year with Elsevier in their efforts to lower subscription fees.
[...] UC published about 50,000 articles last year, and a substantial share, about 10,000, appeared in Elsevier journals. For subscriptions and article fees, UC paid about $11 million, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. (UC says the information is confidential under a non-disclosure agreement.)
There are still many other institutions which continue to purchase subscriptions to these journals. How far away are we from reaching a tipping point?
Motherboard reports Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users' Passwords Exposed Online:
Due a to a misconfigured server, a researcher found a constant stream of Elsevier users' passwords.
Elsevier, the company behind scientific journals such as The Lancet, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world.
It's not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted, but it provided a rolling list of passwords as well as password reset links when a user requested to change their login credentials.
"Most users are .edu [educational institute] accounts, either students or teachers," Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity company SpiderSilk who found the issue, told Motherboard in an online chat. "They could be using the same password for their emails, iCloud, etc."
Hidden in plain sight.
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday March 17 2021, @02:29PM (2 children)
Strictly one person's opinion. Feel free to disagree.
I think a better and more reasonable and rational plan would have been to nuke Elsevier into a smoking crater in the ground.
That would have solved all of the problems in a reasonable manner.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Eratosthenes on Wednesday March 17 2021, @09:22PM (1 child)
From Orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
It is curious that such an industry that used to serve an actual useful purpose, is now a hive of scum and copyright. Why is it that since print on paper once was the only way to distribute and store knowledge, should we now pay for electronic copies that are transmitted and stored with near zero costs? Legacy charges? For what is nothing but an artificial restriction on access to human knowledge? From being a positive service, academic publishers have become the enemy of scholarship, a barrier to the sharing of knowledge, and a blight upon the face of the planet.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 17 2021, @09:46PM
How could science have ever progressed if people didn't put all human knowledge behind copyright pay-walls.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:35PM (1 child)
I found this Youtube video interesting.
Should Knowledge Be Free?
By Medlife Crisis
It pretty much discusses most of the same things that we discussed here on Soylentnews except it's in a video now. He even suggests that maybe the publish or perish model should perish?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 17 2021, @04:37PM
Sorry, I forgot to include the link in the original post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo&list=PLoGvLrkJ6fgNBDiZQ8Dtooe675qu512_F&index=6 [youtube.com]
I, and I would say many others here, agree that the current insanely expensive model needs to be changed. The insane premiums that these publishing companies charge for what little they contribute is ridiculous.