On Nov. 17, 2022, University of Oregon Executive Vice President Janet Woodruff-Borden said UO will pause its subscription journal package with Elsevier Publishing Company at the end of 2022 in an email announcement.
Elsevier is a Dutch company based out of Amsterdam, Netherlands that publishes academic journals, according to Elsevier History. It is one of the largest publishing companies putting out 18% of global research, and over 2,700 digitized journals, according to Fast facts about Elsevier. More than 600 Elsevier journals are open access, according to Fast facts about Elsevier. Open access means online content which is accessible to anyone free of charge, according to Springer.
UO partnered with Oregon State University and Portland State University, who also subscribe to Elsevier’s journal package, to negotiate prices with Elsevier. All three universities ended their subscriptions after failing to reach an agreement.
The Elsevier subscription journal package was UO Libraries’ largest expenditure, making up 10% of its entire budget spendings, Woodruff-Borden said in her email. The subscription makes up 15% of PSU Library’s spending, PSU Library interim dean Michael Bowman said.
Elsevier’s prices have increased each year and have outpaced inflation, Woodruff said in her email. “These unsustainably high and escalating costs ignore modern realities, such as the increasing prevalence of open scholarship, and undermine our very purpose as a public research institution—to advance the creation and dissemination of new knowledge,” she said.
The three universities were looking to cut the cost of each of their subscription packages by 50%, which Elsevier was aware of going into negotiations, Bowman said.
Attempting negotiations with Elsevier was challenging, Bowman said. “They were slow to respond. We had multiple canceled meetings. And there was a reasonable reason for each time, but it was just the accumulation of three cancellations in a row,” he said.
Part of the disagreement between Elsevier and universities was that Elsevier was charging the same price, even though many of its articles were open access, Dave Fowler, a collection management librarian at UO, said. In other words, anyone could have access to certain Elsevier published content without paying a subscription to Elsevier.
“We should not have to supplement that cost or that fee for Elsevier by paying them basically a second time for access to an article,” Fowler said. This is true especially if the authors are from one of the three universities here, he said.
The emergence of open access content is changing the education market, Deitering said. “There’s going to be other changes happening in the market, and I think we’re all playing a little bit of wait and see to see where it goes,” Deitering said.
UO, OSU and PSU are not the only universities who’ve negotiated with Elsevier. The University of Washington also decided to end its contract with Elsevier for 2023. Previously, the University of California ended its Elsevier contract in 2019.
“Publishers like Elsevier benefit from publicly funded research and scholarship produced in public institutions while limiting or denying public access to the same content,” Graduate Teaching Fellow at the UO School of Journalism and Communication Rajeev Ravisankar said.
Elsevier is one of the “Big 5”, the biggest publishing companies of academic content in the world, which includes Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE and Elsevier, Deitering said.
Although the three universities act as a team in negotiating with Elsevier, the specific negotiations are unique to each university. Compared to UO and PSU, OSU Libraries pays the most for its Elsevier journal subscription package, Deitering said. OSU offers robust programs in areas such as natural resources, agriculture and applied science and technology, and Elsevier’s content is particularly “deep” in those areas, she said. “We’re not negotiating for one contract that applies to all three institutions,” she said.
When asked for comment on the contract negotiations, Elsevier said in an email, “Elsevier has been working with University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Portland State University to meet their budget requirements while continuing to provide researchers with access to Elsevier content. We worked hard to put flexible offers on the table and regret that we were not able to reach agreement with UO, OSU and PSU. We hope to welcome them back as a customer in the future.”
So how does this affect students?
As of Jan. 1, UO students no longer have subscription access to new Elsevier content published on a subscription basis, according to UO Libraries’ Elsevier Contract Negotiations. However, UO Libraries will retain access to 189 of the most subscribed to journals ending Dec. 31, 2022 in perpetuity and 609 journals from before 1994 which UO purchased as backfiles, according to UO Libraries’ Elsevier Contract Negotiations.
Students will still have access to new Elsevier published content through UO Library’s interlibrary loan service and Article Galaxy Scholar.
Article Galaxy Scholar is a product that the three universities will deploy which allows users to request articles either by borrowing or purchasing, Deitering said.
“It is possible that much of our campus needs will be met through instant open access provision of Elsevier content without needing the library to intervene,” University Librarian and Vice Provost at UO Alicia Salaz said.
Because of the contract lapse, students and faculty may experience delays in having access to requested Elsevier articles, Salaz said. “In the long term however, we are confident that students, researchers and scholars everywhere will benefit from a system that doesn’t exploit academic labor for excessive profit,” she said.
“The impact to undergraduate students will likely be low, unless they are engaging in research activities,” Graduate Employee and PhD Student in the Department of Computer Science at UO Sam Schwartz said. “The primary impact of the ending of the Elsevier subscription will be on graduate students, faculty and others engaging in academic research,” he said.
Undergraduate students would need Elsevier-specific articles less than graduate students, because they could find similar information from a variety of different journal publications, Bowman said.
After assessing the impact of their individual contract terminations, UO, OSU and PSU will resume contract negotiations with Elsevier in 2023. Fowler is optimistic about future negotiations with Elsevier. “It’s possible that Elsevier may start to rethink things if enough schools are dropping out of these deals,” he said.
For graduate students wanting to learn more about the contract negotiations, University Librarian and Vice Provost Alicia Salaz will host a Q&A session over Zoom on Wednesday at 11 a.m.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include Fowler’s first name and occupation.
