I’m sure you’ve heard of Elsevier, and you’ll likely hear a lot more about it in the coming weeks, as the UC Libraries negotiate a new contract with this scholarly journal publishing giant. Elsevier has earned international criticism for profit margins of close to forty percent, which far exceed inflation, and for its opposition to open access (except in its own open access journals).
About that last point: in addition to licensed (i.e., subscription) journals, Elsevier publishes open access journals, in which authors pay article publishing charges but all readership is free, and hybrid journals, which require a subscription to read but in which authors can pay a fee to make individual articles open access. Our negotiations focus not just on the amount the UC Libraries pay to provide access to the journals but also on the additional amount UC authors pay in publishing charges.
In 2017 UC paid Elsevier more than $10 million for access to not quite two thousand journals, and UC authors paid nearly $1 million on top of that in article publishing fees. In addition, many campus units subscribe to Elsevier’s non-journal research tools, bringing the total systemwide spend to more than $11.5 million.
In the larger sense, UC is paying even more. Countless UC faculty members and researchers publish in Elsevier journals, review manuscripts for those journals, or serve on the journals’ editorial boards. The company is making its almost forty percent profit margins off your intellectual capital and uncompensated work.
We hope that Elsevier will see the sound business logic of signing a new contract that reduces the UC system’s total expenditures and eliminates double-dipping. But we want you to be aware and to consider your options:
♦ Leverage UC’s open access policies and the UC eScholarship repository to make your final pre-publication manuscripts publicly accessible.
♦ If you’re on the editorial board of an Elsevier journal, contact the publisher and let them know that you share our concerns.
♦ Look at other journal publishing options, including prestigious open access journals in your discipline. Contact your subject librarian for additional information and assistance.
♦ Consider declining to review articles for Elsevier journals until we can see that negotiations are moving in a positive direction.
I will update you as soon as there is any news on the progress of the negotiations. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me by phone at 310.825.1201 or email:
vsteel@library.ucla.edu.
Source: https://t.e2ma.net/message/a2uruj/a61ry
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