After the Elsevier ‘Tipping Point,’ Research Libraries Consider Their Options

Research librarians are giving notice: The pressures that led the University of California system to cut the cord with Elsevier aren’t foreign to their campuses.

After the UC system announced last month that it would not renew its subscription contract with Elsevier, the journal-publishing giant, librarians are telling their faculty members that something’s got to give. Their budgets are flat, and prices of bulk journal subscriptions — dubbed “big deals” — keep going up.

Some teased possible changes in the subscriptions through which faculty members see groundbreaking research. Others simply sought to fill in professors curious about the implications of California’s momentous break with Elsevier. Taken together, the notices signal the growing empowerment of institutions to stand their ground as they look ahead to their own negotiations with the publisher.

Elaine L. Westbrooks, the university librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week emailed her campus that “difficult choices” may lie ahead as the university approaches talks with Elsevier.

Calling the UC system’s decision “bold,” she indicated that she had started meeting with deans, administrators, academic departments, and faculty groups to discuss journal costs and other issues. Renewing the bundles, she wrote, is “unaffordable and unsustainable.”

Westbrooks told The Chronicle that while she is not prepared to say that her university will follow UC’s lead, it must entertain various options. The university is focused on affordability, she said, and budgets are extremely tight.

“This is the tipping point for us,” Westbrooks said. After the UC news, she said, “I’m more compelled to disrupt … We’re more empowered to stick to our values.”

Oregon State University’s Elsevier contract won’t expire until the end of 2020, but Faye A. Chadwell, its university librarian, wrote to the campus this month in case people were wondering what would happen after UC’s announcement, which she said had “caught the attention” of institutions in the United States and Canada. She promised in her note to keep faculty members and graduate students aware of “the issues and possible outcomes.”

The University of Virginia library’s director of information policy wrote a post about what UVa researchers should know about the UC decision, including that the high prices of big deals consume large shares of library budgets. The director, Brandon Butler, pledged that the library would consult with deans, administrators, faculty members, and other members of the university community “as we move forward with our own rethinking of big deals.”

“It may just be, if one big institution walks completely away and lives to tell, it feels like a game changer that everyone else could be more courageous about what they want to do,” he told The Chronicle.

Budget Challenges

The UC system’s announcement framed its decision to cease negotiating as a push for open-access publishing, a model through which professors or their funding agencies pay to make research freely available to anyone, instead of readers’ paying for access.

But other research libraries across the country, though many express support for open access, say they must reckon with concern for the bottom line.

A 2016 survey by the Association of College and Research Libraries showed that 60 percent of libraries had reported flat budgets for the previous five years, and 19 percent had seen decreased funding. On average, the group said, libraries at institutions that grant doctoral degrees spent about 70 percent of their materials budgets on continuing commitments to subscriptions.

So when subscription costs rise — in UC and Elsevier’s case, from $9.5 million in 2014 to $10.6 million in 2018 — libraries feel cornered. (Elsevier representatives have attributed rising costs to greater value, as the breadth of research expands each year.)

“I have a flat budget,” Westbrooks said, “so the inflation is really killing me.”

Librarians have signaled for at least a decade that something must change in big-deal subscription contracts, urging more-affordable pricing models and greater flexibility. And it’s not as if many of those campuses haven’t considered issues of open access and scholarship in the past.

At Oregon State, for example, the university has long had an open-access policy, and the institution had already started thinking about its future negotiations with Elsevier before UC’s announcement, Chadwell said.

Drawing Attention

Still, Butler, the UVa director, characterized UC’s decision as a “climactic point in a movement that’s been building for a long time.”

“It was kind of a marvelous thing to watch,” he said of how UC had communicated with its faculty members throughout the negotiations.

Librarians weren’t the only ones watching. The UC news rippled out to faculty and staff members who may not have otherwise been following the open-access debate on their own campuses. Library employees told The Chronicle that colleagues around campus had sent them text messages and emails to hear their thoughts on the news.

The announcement came at a good time for a task force at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which released a draft set of recommendations on open sharing of MIT publications, data, and other materials shortly after UC broke off negotiations with Elsevier. That draft set out the campus’s principles and policy recommendations, and did not focus on budgetary issues.

Chris Bourg, MIT’s director of libraries, said California’s decision hadn’t changed the substance of MIT’s recommendations beyond a footnote mentioning the announcement. The news did, however, catch the faculty’s attention, she said.

“It is really helpful in terms of galvanizing faculty to pay attention and to really think about how we want to act as a scholarly community,” Bourg said.

The publishing landscape has changed quickly since MIT’s task force began, in the summer of 2017, as European countries and some American universities retreated from major publishers. The task force’s members, Bourg said, have kept abreast of the changing environment.

To Bourg, “there’s no doubt” that the prices of bulk subscriptions are unhealthy for libraries, and she wrote in an email that containing subscription costs is “absolutely a big concern.” But she said the university’s goals are broader. Business models for libraries should support a goal to disseminate knowledge and data more widely, she said, “not the other way around.”

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