UO Libraries' Elsevier Contract Negotiations

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October 2023 Update

The UO Libraries spent much of this spring and summer monitoring the impacts of our Elsevier contract lapse, which took effect January 1.  Like our peers at Oregon State and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have adopted alternative access methods to provide our faculty and students with access to needed Elsevier-published materials. Librarians working across disciplines have also kept in touch with their faculty and student constituencies to monitor inquiries and gather feedback on how these alternative access mechanisms are working. We collected data on the usage and costs of these systems. 

Collected Data Points

  • As of September 8, extensive Elsevier-published backfiles remain instantly available to campus through our online databases. 
  • As of September 8, 1,547 unique campus users, including faculty, students, and staff, have used our article request service to purchase an individual Elsevier article that is not available through the backfiles. 
  • Those users have executed 4,245 article purchase transactions, distributed across 877 different Elsevier-owned journals.
  • The total projected annual expenditure on fulfilling these requests is currently less than 1/3 the cost of our former contract with Elsevier.
  • Our expert library faculty members used bibliometric tools to conduct a thorough analysis estimating that in 2022, Elsevier earned more than $500,000 in revenue above and beyond the revenue provided by our subscription contract, through individual author publication charges covered by grants, department funds, or library funds to publish their works on an open access basis—just from UO alone. This analysis provides stronger evidence to confirm that Elsevier is charging us twice for the same content: even as we now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to make our scholarship open, they continue to bill us the same or more for subscription read access to the closed portions of the Elsevier catalog. 
  • Feedback from users of our alternative access service suggest that it is not as seamless as instant, one-click access, but that it is relatively fast and convenient and thus, returning to a contract where we are paying three times as much for the slight improvement in convenience may not carry clear and convincing value.
  • Similar trends and feedback were collected by our counterparts at Oregon State University. 

Negotiations

In September, we shared our observations with Elsevier and attempted to reopen negotiations as a triad with Oregon State and Portland State Universities. We offered to open a discussion starting from terms we had left off on late in 2022. These terms focused on reassessing our contract pricing based on our usage of subscription materials, providing greater transparency in pricing, and accounting for the drastic increase in author-fee revenue that the UO’s authors are providing to Elsevier. 

Elsevier has responded indicating that they are not interested in considering or discussing those terms. 

Next Steps

Our next step is to consider resubscribing to a limited set of individual journal titles, where we can see continued sustained demand to the point that individual article purchases are a large share of the cost of annual subscription. UO, OSU, and PSU librarians are developing proposed title lists in consultation with academic faculty in areas they serve and in consideration of our available title usage and pricing data. 

As we consider limited journal resubscriptions, we will continue to provide our community with access to all Elsevier published content either through our backfiles or through article purchasing and interlibrary loan services. We thank every member of our campus community for your support, feedback, and partnership as we fight for a better deal for the UO and for our tuition-paying students. We continue to seek paths toward a sustainable future for knowledge production and dissemination that also fairly values the academic labor of our communities and returns fair value to the knowledge-creation enterprise.

How will the outcome of these negotiations impact you? Have more questions? See FAQ below.

Negotiations with Elsevier began in Spring 2022. Our original goal was to have concluded them by the end of Summer 2022, with a start date for a new contract in January 2023, but despite numerous negotiation efforts working as a team with Oregon State University and Portland State University, we've been unable to come to a new agreement with Elsevier.

As Acting Provost Janet Woodruff-Borden indicated in her November 17 campus-wide email, "Our three institutional libraries agree that further negotiation with Elsevier this year will not be productive, and all three will pause further engagement with Elsevier until they can assess the [full] impact of the contract lapse. We intend to reopen negotiations together in 2023. Our librarians will continue to gather feedback and input from our campus communities to inform proposals and to push for a fair and sustainable resolution."

Read the latest update from Acting Provost Janet Woodruff-Borden. Find additional updates in the Related Links section below.

Our libraries are committed to minimizing any inconvenience to researchers and ensuring that they're able to access the content they need through a host of alternative methods including interlibrary loan. Use our Elsevier alternatives quick guide to locate resources using other methods.

Alternative access to Elsevier articles

UO Libraries is providing UO students and employees with faster access to Elsevier articles during the Elsevier contract lapse with Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS). Learn more about AGS and how to use it on our AGS research guide.

Find more detailed descriptions about how to access articles on our Alternative Access to Elsevier Articles webpage.

Background

The scholarly, commercial publishing marketplace has changed significantly since our last negotiation with Elsevier in 2014. Elsevier launched their first APC-based publications in 2013 and at the time of our last contract, open access publishing was not seen as an integral part of their commitment to the world of research. The main development is that today, of the 2,637 journals currently accepting submissions and listed on the ScienceDirect website, a quarter of these journals, 772, are listed as fully open access supported by APC-based funding, and a further 1,974 journals are listed as containing open access content. We also recognize that multiple academic institutions/consortia have negotiated new contracts to incorporate concessions for continued or past publication open access provision and/or a reduction of the spend paid for current access to Elsevier journal content.

Goals

Oregon State University Libraries, Portland State University Library, and the University of Oregon Libraries entered into contract negotiations with Elsevier for journal access in 2023, and for up to three years beyond that. For the sake of transparency, we reached out to our respective campuses to arrive at goals we hoped to achieve with this renewal cycle. We join academic libraries and consortia across the United States in ascribing to the core principles for publisher contracts set forth by the MIT Libraries, which are:

  • No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals
  • No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights
  • Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit
  • Publishers will provide computational access to subscribed content as a standard part of all contracts, with no restrictions on non-consumptive, computational analysis of the corpus of subscribed content
  • Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives
  • Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models

To this end, all three institutions wanted to reduce our spend with Elsevier by half of the current amounts paid by each institution. We are interested in obtaining the backflipping of locally authored content to open access (previously published journal articles from the last five years or older), removing any limitations on interlibrary lending (ILL), ensuring end-users’ identifiable account information is not utilized inappropriately, and eliminating any language that does not allow us to openly disclose the contract we have negotiated.

Help

The three libraries would like to continue to hear from their respective campus constituencies about any concerns or questions that they may have about these negotiations. At the University of Oregon, please direct any questions and comments to this feedback form.

OSU librarians suspend negotiations with worldwide scholarly information provider, The Daily Barometer, January 17, 2023

Pressing 'pause' on Elsevier subscription, Oregon Daily Emerald, January 10, 2023

Elsevier message from Acting Provost Janet Woodruff-Borden, campus-wide e-mail, November 17, 2022

Negotiations with Elsevier stall, contract to expire Dec. 31, Around the O, November 21, 2022

UO Libraries initiates contract negotiations with Elsevier, Around the O, July 26, 2022

Input Sought as UO Libraries Enters Negotiations with Elsevier, Around the O, March 11, 2022

Feedback Form: Have questions? Want to hear back from a librarian? Use our form.

FAQ's

Question: What are the impacts of cancelling our Elsevier agreement at the UO?

Answer:

  • We retain access to content published through the duration of our subscription of these 189 journals*, through Dec 31, 2022, in perpetuity.
  • We retain access to the content of **Backfiles purchased, we have purchased backfiles for, covering date ranges prior to 1994, in perpetuity.
  • We will not have subscription access to new Elsevier content published on a closed/subscription basis from January 1, 2023, onward.
  • We will have access to all new Elsevier content published on an open access basis, including all publications in fully open SCOAP3 journals such as Physics Letters B, 50% of new Cell Press articles, and 100% of Cell Press articles older than 12 months along with all articles in any journal with a corresponding author affiliated with one of these institutions covered by a blanket OA publishing agreement.
  • We will be able to access closed/subscription Elsevier articles through the University Library’s interlibrary loan service, with delivery of most requested articles in 1-2 business days.
  • In 2023, based on historic usage and subscription coverage, we estimate that 85% of article requests would be instantly accessible for UO users, and 15% would hit a paywall and have to be re-routed through interlibrary loan or another source to obtain the desired material.

Question: How will we reinvest savings from our subscription contract?

Answer: The UO Libraries will reinvest savings into critically needed open scholarship and data initiatives. We believe in a fairer and more affordable future for knowledge creation and will keep pushing to get there. We will seek input from our UO community on how to prioritize the allocation of savings. Some current priorities include:

  • Reserving half of the budget for 2 years, leaving the door open to negotiating a new contract even after a lapse
  • Allocating a percentage of savings to interlibrary loan service to reduce turnaround times for article requests
  • Allocating a percentage of savings to bolstering discretionary collections funds and monograph purchasing
  • Allocating a percentage of savings to pursuing new open access publishing agreements with scholarly societies and nonprofits such as the American Chemical Society, Public Library of Science, or others, allowing UO authors to openly publish their works without needing to pay an individual article processing charge (APC)
  • Allocating a percentage of savings to developing digital infrastructure and data storage, together with campus IS and OVPRI units, to help UO researchers openly disseminate large or complex research datasets
  • Allocating a percentage of savings to resubscribing to a smaller number of individual journal titles from Elsevier

Question: What is UO’s Open Access Policy?

Answer: UO’s Open Access Scholarship Policy, passed by the UO Faculty Senate in May 2021, promotes the dissemination of UO Faculty's research:

"UO Faculty shall henceforth make a journal-allowed version of their articles openly accessible after publication following the guidelines of each scholarly journal. This may include submission to Scholars' Bank, a discipline specific open access repository, or publication in an open access journal. Library staff will work with faculty to support these efforts.
All works by UO faculty, staff, and students are welcomed for submission to Scholars' Bank in accordance with guidelines provided by publishers in order to improve access and dissemination."

Learn more at Open Access at the University of Oregon.