A Lesson From UC’s Split With Elsevier: Keep the Faculty in the Loop

U. of Kansas

The University of California system’s announced break with the publishing giant Elsevier sent a clear message to research universities across the country: If your institution wants to follow suit, get ready to share a lot of information with your faculty.

During prolonged negotiations with Elsevier over a journal-subscription contract, UC held forums on its campuses and sent regular emails to its faculty members. The University of California at Los Angeles encouraged its professors to publish their work in non-Elsevier journals as the negotiations dragged on. And warning that access to Elsevier’s stable of some 2,500 journals may soon expire, UC listed possible ways scholars could read articles in those journals, including through interlibrary loans, in online repositories like PubMed, and by simply contacting the author and asking for a copy.

California’s 10-campus system is only the latest institution to walk away from a mass-subscription package with a major journal-publishing company. But because the deal’s players — UC and Elsevier — are research and publishing heavyweights, the negotiations were closely watched by advocates for open access and library deans who may soon be entering similar negotiations of their own.

Across the country, academic libraries’ tight budgets continue to clash with rising fees for bulk journal subscriptions, dubbed “big deals.” UC’s expiring contract with Elsevier cost about $50 million over five years. (Publishing companies say prices increase because journals publish more and more articles each year, creating more value.)

That financial concern is key. But so, too, are more idealistic questions about the merits of publishing in subscription-based journals. In announcing its decision to call off the contract talks, UC cited its support for open-access publishing, a model that would allow anyone to read research findings without having to pay an expensive subscription.

“Our members are having conversations with their senior administrators about these kinds of issues,” said Mary Lee Kennedy, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. “I would not expect that this issue will go away.”

Lisa A. German, dean of libraries at the University of Houston, had followed UC’s negotiations closely. When she read UC’s announcement, she forwarded it to her university’s president and provost.

UC officials “spent quite a bit of time getting their ducks in a row, so to speak. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing,” she said, adding that UC’s communications throughout the Elsevier talks signaled support from both top administrators and the faculty. “They’ve created a blueprint for how to break a big deal in the right way,” she said.

‘A Wonderful Move’

On Friday, the day after UC made its announcement, Kevin L. Smith drafted an email to his colleagues as dean of the University of Kansas libraries. Kansas is negotiating its contract with Elsevier this year, and drawing on UC’s example, Smith is considering hosting forums and sending regular emails to professors, to update them on the status of the talks.

“UC modeled a level of engagement with their faculty that is vitally important,” Smith said on Friday, adding, too, that he wants to include in conversations the interim provost and a library committee that is appointed by the University Senate. “I need to involve our faculty sooner and more deeply than I thought,” he said.

Keeping faculty members in the loop is crucial because they depend on the work published in Elsevier’s journals to plan and conduct research. Without subscriptions, access is more challenging. These are “legitimate concerns,” Smith said.

“A central part of our job is to provide them with the resources to do their job,” he said. “If they panic — they have a right to — and we have an obligation to help them understand we will still be supporting their research … we need to engage them to allay that concern as much as we can.”

In a series of statements published on the University of California at Berkeley’s website, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, who helped lead UC’s negotiation team, said that if Elsevier were to cut off UC from articles, that step would affect only those published since January 1. MacKie-Mason, university librarian at Berkeley, added that UC authors could still publish in Elsevier journals.

Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, acknowledged that not every professor would think that abandoning big-deal subscriptions was “a wonderful move.” But UC’s regular meetings with faculty members, she said, had made sure they didn’t feel left “out in the cold.”

Joseph’s coalition has been tracking big-deal negotiations, finding that six universities canceled bundles for 2018, with Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley. But UC’s decision is distinct, she said, because of its scope and because the system garnered the political support it needed.

“The response we’ve seen so far, even informally, is, frankly, ‘Holy crap, this is really something,’” she said. “It’s big.”

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.