TO: The UC Berkeley academic community
FROM: Paul Alivisatos, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Barbara Spackman, Chair, Academic Senate - Berkeley Division
Jeff MacKie-Mason, University Librarian and Professor
RE: Potential Changes to UC's Relationship with Elsevier in January 2019
December 19, 2018
Dear Colleagues,
The University of California is renegotiating its systemwide licenses with some of the world’s largest scholarly journal publishers, including industry giant Elsevier. Through these negotiations, UC is seeking to constrain the excessive costs of journal subscriptions and to make it easier and more affordable for UC authors to publish their research open access.
For more information, including negotiation status updates, see Elsevier journal negotiations.
If we are unable to reach an agreement with Elsevier before our current contract ends on December 31, we may lose access to future articles in Elsevier’s journals through their ScienceDirect platform. UC scholars will still be able to use ScienceDirect to access most articles with a publish date before 2019 because UC has permanent access rights to them.
UC intends to continue negotiating in good faith. It is up to Elsevier to decide whether to continue to provide UC faculty and students with full access during the period of negotiations. Should access be reduced, the Library is prepared to assist in obtaining access to needed content through other means, such as interlibrary loan.
The university’s approach to the negotiations — consistent with a Call to Action by the (faculty and administrator) advisory committee to the UC Provost, and a Declaration of Rights and Principles issued by the library committee of the UC Academic Senate — intends to give UC authors maximum flexibility in determining how they want to publish. For those who wish to publish open access, discounted open access fees negotiated in bulk, along with funding support from the UC Libraries to help pay those fees, would remove cost as a barrier. Authors would also have the option to opt out of open access and publish their research behind the journal’s traditional subscription paywall.
By contrast, UC researchers who wish to publish open access in a subscription journal today must pay 100% of the article processing charge themselves. Many choose to do so; in fact, UC authors pay nearly $1 million a year in voluntary open access publishing charges to Elsevier alone, on top of the millions of dollars being paid by the UC Libraries for subscriptions to those same journals.
We do not have as much information as we’d like at this point, but what we do know is published on the Library’s website, which will continue to provide updates as they are available. Here you can find more information on why UC is pursuing this new approach and details on the potential impact on Berkeley researchers. Questions can also be directed by email to: scholarly-resources@lists.
Paul Alivisatos, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Barbara Spackman, Chair, Academic Senate - Berkeley Division
Jeff MacKie-Mason, University Librarian and Professor