In an unprecedented move last year, the University of California system terminated journal negotiations with Elsevier over open access issues and higher costs. Last month MIT did the same, saying the publisher’s proposal did not align with the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. The UC system includes more than 280,000 students and over 227,000 faculty staff. MIT has roughly 24,000 students, faculty and staff in its system.
Developed in 2019, MIT’s Framework creates a mechanism to ensure research is freely and immediately available, while recognizing that the value in published papers lies with the authors and institutions that support them. Since it’s debut, more than 100 institutions have endorsed the MIT Framework in recognition of its potential to advance open scholarship.
“I am disappointed that we were not able to reach a contract with Elsevier that honors the principles of the MIT Framework, but I am proud knowing that the MIT community—as well as hundreds of colleagues across the country—stand by the importance of these principles for advancing the public good and the progress of science,” said Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries. “In the face of these unprecedented global challenges, equitable and open access to knowledge is more critical than ever.”
A key sticking point in the failed negotiations involved the part of MIT’s Framework that requires direct deposit of scholarly articles in MIT repositories immediately upon publication. Automated deposit would be a first for Elsevier as the publisher usually has a sliding embargo. In a statement, Elsevier said it was working on a “green and gold” open access pilot model that would continue to work toward full open access over the course of a 4-year agreement. However, the “read and publish” model did not meet MIT’s Framework requirements.
Meanwhile, in early 2019, the UC system had disagreements with Elsevier regarding both open-access and monetary compensation. While Elsevier did consider some of UC’s conditions—including providing UC authors with open access publishing options across much of the publisher’s portfolio of journals—it did so at a much higher cost.
“UC has consistently requested a contract that would result in open access for 100 percent of UC-authored research articles. As presented, Elsevier’s proposal assumed a much smaller number of open access articles, yet would still increase UC’s costs. When we calculated what it would cost to achieve 100 percent open access under the terms that Elsevier proposed, UC’s total payments would increase by about 80 percent, or an additional $30 million over three years,” UC wrote in a statement at the time.
The proposal also required UC to forgo publishing in and access to a significant number of Elsevier journals, and did not provide full financial support to authors who lack access to grant funds.
According to the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper, in the 14 months after the expiration of UC’s Elsevier contract, librarians and researchers across the campuses say it has had less impact than expected. Librarians have received very little feedback from students, researchers and faculty indicating that the move is negatively affecting their studies. In fact, UC libraries had expected to see a substantial increase in requests for Elsevier articles through the Inter-Library Loan program—which provides access to materials from libraries outside the UC system in both the U.S. and abroad—but have only observed a slight increase.
“We’re only seeing 15 to 20 percent of what we projected. What that says to me is that people are finding other articles…or they’re going without. It’s just not turned out to be as much of a need as we thought,” UCLA librarian Virginia Steel told the Daily Bruin.
Both MIT and UC have said they are open to resuming negotiations with Elsevier, but only if the publisher is able to provide a contract that shows substantive progress on meeting the universities’ commitment to open access publishing. For its part, Elsevier has said the same, hoping to renew negotiations with both universities in short time.
“Ultimately, at Elsevier, we see MIT’s framework as a strong roadmap for progress of science and the public good. We share and support this end goal. The challenge is how to get from where we are today to what the framework outlines,” Elsevier said in a statement after negotiations with MIT stalled in June. “We…hope to find the path forward together in the interests of the research communities we both serve and the important work they do.”
In April 2020, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State University of New York (SUNY) also chose not to renew their current journal package with Elsevier. UNC said the publisher “failed to provide an affordable path” to renew approximately 2,000 e-journal titles. Instead, the university libraries chose to subscribe to a much smaller set of individual Elsevier titles starting May 1, 2020.
Similarly, SUNY opted not to renew its “big deal” with Elsevier for ScienceDirect in favor of a short list of titles to which campuses across the system have access to as of April 1, 2020. The two sides negotiated for over a year, but in the end “a vast difference remained between their proposed charges and our assessment of the value of the collection,” SUNY said in an April statement about the deal.
“SUNY and the SUNY Libraries Consortia have closely tracked the marketplace for the last two years, and we believe the price of scholarly journals has been profoundly inflated relative to their value. The journal marketplace is dynamic, and publishers no longer have the same monopolistic stranglehold they’ve had in the past over content. The negotiating team’s perspective was that Elsevier did not go far enough in recognizing that the marketplace has changed,” SUNY concluded.