U. of California Canceled Its Elsevier Subscription. Now It’s Losing Access.

U. of California at Berkeley

Elsevier began shutting off access to certain research articles for the sprawling University of California system on Wednesday, nearly five months after negotiations toward a subscription contract ceased.

California left the bargaining table in late February, after its latest five-year contract concluded at the end of 2018. The two parties disagreed over how much the university system should pay for a subscription agreement that would make all articles published by California scholars available free to anyone anywhere, instead of behind a paywall.

Access has remained for the 10 California campuses from February until now. UC will lose access to Elsevier articles published in 2019, after its contract expired, in addition to a portion of other historical content for which the system did not have perpetual access. The system had one day’s warning from Elsevier, a university official said.

California’s decision in February brought statements of support from libraries across the country, which have struggled with paying for subscriptions as costs rise and their budgets remain stagnant. Librarians have said they perceive California’s move as empowering as they approach their own negotiations with the company.

But here’s where the rubber meets the road. Not being able to access newly published scholarship may present a nuisance for California’s faculty and students as they conduct their research. The system has proposed various ways of getting access, including internet-browser plug-ins, contacting the piece’s authors for a copy, and interlibrary loans, which the University of California at Los Angeles said can take up to four days. Elsevier said that in 2018, California users downloaded about 11 million articles.

Faculty leaders indicated support for the UC system on Wednesday. Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, university librarian and chief digital scholarship officer, who is one of California’s lead negotiators, said he has heard no sharp backlash, though he acknowledged that the company was still in the process of removing access.

In an interview, he said that the system recognizes that it is giving up “instant, easy access,” but he characterized that decision as boosting the broader goal of moving publishing norms at large closer to an open-access model.

“We’re balancing two different objectives here,” he said.

In a written statement, Gemma Hersh, Elsevier’s vice president for global policy, said the company extended access to the university system at no charge “in the good-faith hope that UC negotiators would come back to the bargaining table and reach a mutually agreeable compromise.”

The decision, she wrote, “saddens us, because we believe it will have a negative impact on the UC’s renowned research community and because lack of our services will prevent UC students, faculty, researchers, and medical professionals benefiting from reliable, real-time access to peer-reviewed, published research.”

The company, Hersh wrote, offered in negotiations to increase fivefold the number of UC open-access articles published in Elsevier journals, in addition to the ability to read articles behind Elsevier’s paywall, for total price increases that it characterized as in line with inflation.

That price was too much for California, MacKie-Mason said, adding that the system would be open to re-entering negotiations if Elsevier was ready to talk about reducing costs further.

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