UNC and SUNY reject Elsevier, joining academia’s pushback

Two major US universities have rejected contract demands by publishing giant Elsevier, bolstering a movement to break what they regard as the company’s costly grip on higher education.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the State University of New York both announced that they are ending comprehensive contracts with Elsevier and instead signing smaller pacts for access to individual journals.

“This is about breaking the ‘Big Deal’,” said Elaine Westbrooks, chief librarian at UNC, one of the nation’s top dozen universities by research expenditures. “It’s really long overdue.”

SUNY, the nation’s largest comprehensive university system, said in a statement that its negotiations with the publisher ended with “vast difference” in their assessments of the value of Elsevier’s journals.

The moves are part of a growing uprising by universities in the US and abroad to cut overall expenditures on scientific journals while ensuring that published findings are freely available to readers worldwide.

Elsevier has been a particular target, accused by academics of extracting exceptionally high profits from a research enterprise generally financed by taxpayers, of resisting open-access models, and of being defiant towards calls for change.

The nation’s highest-profile showdown has involved the University of California system, which ended its Elsevier contract last year after insisting upon lower payments and open-access article formats, and has been helping other institutions manage similar challenges.

Elsevier appears to be taking an especially hard line on open-access policies involving the most-research intensive universities that produce the most valuable articles, Ms Westbrooks said.

But UC and other institutions that have rejected full-access agreements, including Florida State and Louisiana State universities, are showing researchers that they can survive without much of Elsevier’s content and find alternative routes – such as sharing or individual article purchases – to get anything essential, she said.

The financial distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic likely will lead universities to be even more insistent on cutting costs, said one of UC’s chief negotiators, Jeff MacKie-Mason, the university librarian at the University of California at Berkeley.

UNC had been paying $2.6 million (£2 million) a year for its researchers to read Elsevier's library of some 2,500 scientific journals, and will begin next month to pay $1.6 million for about 400 titles, Ms Westbrooks said.

SUNY, with 64 campuses of varying sizes and missions, had been paying Elsevier about $9 million a year and expects that amount to now fall by more than half.

“The most frustrating aspect of this whole negotiation,” Ms Westbrooks said of UNC’s talks with Elsevier, “is this assumption that the university was just going to figure out a way to pay for it – they just wanted us to write the check, and keep paying $2.6 million.”

SUNY described both parties in its talks as “earnest”, but said it felt “that Elsevier did not go far enough in recognising that the marketplace has changed”.

Elsevier said it understood that universities need to do “what is best for them, their students and researchers”. Responding in writing to questions about the UNC and SUNY negotiations, the publisher said it aims to provide its customers “with the flexibility to choose the most appropriate access for them”.

The pressure from universities and governmental and private funders of scientific research has led Elsevier and other major academic publishers to introduce some open-access models, usually financed by fees paid by the authors.

Such movement could be a sign of badly needed change in scientific publishing, Ms Westbrooks said. At the same time, she added, the companies still exercise historically high levels of control over scholarly publishing relative to faculty and researchers.

“This could help instigate some change,” she said of the trend toward smaller-scale contracts. “But, to be honest, I don’t believe this alone is going to transform our system.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com