Cost dispute cuts UC access to research
On Wednesday, professors and students across the University of California who tried to read articles published in any of 2,500 scholarly journals since Jan. 1 got an unpleasant surprise: They couldn’t.
Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of journals — from the famous Lancet to the lessknown Journal of Psychosomatic Research — had cut UC off.
“We are sorry for the inconvenience and we hope to continue to work with the University of California to find a solution,” the Dutch publishing company announced in a statement Wednesday, after telling UC Tuesday evening what it planned to do at midnight.
It’s a move that UC faculty and students have been preparing for since February, when UC’s California Digital Library ended a year of negotiations with the giant publisher, unable to agree on how much content should be open access — a major new priority at UC — and at what price.
UC and scholars around the world are rebelling against publishing prices they say have become not only too expensive, but also incompatible with the idea that scholarly articles
can and should be available to everyone with internet access. They expect to pay for subscriptions and “open access publishing fees.” But they also want publishers to make articles freely available to the public by default.
Meanwhile, UC depends heavily on journal articles from Elsevier. According to the company, researchers download articles every three seconds — 11 million in 2018.
“For a worldclass university system that prides itself on the quality of its research, that cancellation represents a real challenge,” Elsevier Senior Vice President Gemma Hersh, a member of the negotiating team, said in a statement.
“With access now turned off, the librarians are now proposing researchers instead use interlibrary loans, which could take anywhere from one to four days to provide the article,” said Hersh. “One senior library official has repeatedly pointed to illegal sources of articles, including a Russiabased piracy site.”
UC users will still be able to access articles published before the $11 million contract ended in December. And UC scholars will still be able to submit their research for publication in Elsevier journals. UC says its researchers produce nearly 10% of what’s published in the U.S.
But to do that research, they need to read what others have written.
“The UC libraries are prepared to help them get the materials they need in other legal ways,” said Jeffrey MacKieMason, university librarian at UC Berkeley and cochair of the UC system’s publisher negotiations task force. “While it may take a few minutes to a few days longer to get an article via other legal means (including but not limited to interlibrary loan), the libraries have also been putting systems in place over the past several months to expedite urgent article requests when needed.
Researchers can also ask the authors themselves to email their article, he said.
The university’s voluntary withdrawal from the Elsevier contract indicates that the inconvenience of finding the articles elsewhere is outweighed by its commitment to openaccess research, and faculty leaders from all 10 campuses have signed a message of support. UC’s affinity for the global movement toward open access — and its opposition to the costly subscriptionbased model — emerged in 2013 and is accelerating as its contracts with publishers expire.
Yet reactions among the thousands of faculty members across UC have not been uniformly supportive. Some have “understandable concern about how they will access the articles they need for their work,” MacKieMason said. “We recognize that change is often difficult and it is going to take time for people to learn new processes.”
In April, UC President Janet Napolitano posted an essay on her social media page saying the university system is “working to secure universal openaccess publishing of all our research so that anyone will be able to read it, free of charge.”
She cited examples of UC’s contributions, including identifying the hereditary breast cancer gene and helping lay groundwork for the internet, and said such knowledge “belongs to the public.”
Napolitano also noted that taxpayers already pay for the state and federal grants that finance the research. “Yet, the current academic publishing model requires those same taxpayers to pay a fee to access its findings. That’s hardly fair.”
Elsevier says its system is more than fair.
“The company offered to provide the same service at a price adjusted for inflation,” said Hersh, whose company said the $11 million UC paid was less than 4% of the library budget for all of UC. “The actual cost per downloaded article is just a dollar, a number that has fallen 20% in the past decade,” she said.
Hersh also pointed to Germany, where researchers have been without Elsevier articles for more than a year. She said that 83% of those surveyed complained of a “significant decline” in their research productivity and that most wanted the contract renewed.
“Elsevier is ready to sit down with the California Digital Library negotiators to find some sort of compromise,” she said.
UC says it would be happy to reopen negotiations — if Elsevier makes open access the default for UC authors and “not at the exorbitant increase in price that Elsevier is demanding,” MacKieMason said.