University Libraries renews Elsevier contract for 2021-2023
The University of Colorado Boulder Libraries has renewed a three-year contract with the publisher Elsevier for continued access to its academic journals.
The contract covers 2,300 journal titles included in Elsevier’s Freedom Collection and additional titles from Cell Press, Lancet, Clinics of North America and other society titles hosted on the ScienceDirect platform.
The contract was signed by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, a consortium of research, public and educational institutions of which the University Libraries are a member. Under the terms of the new deal faculty, staff and students at 15 academic libraries across Colorado and Wyoming will have continued access to these scholarly journals. Alliance members will also enjoy an overall cost reduction of about $1.5 million or 15 percent savings from our contract that expired in 2020.
“With these negotiations, we have secured access to Elsevier’s academic journal content at a reduced cost for all members in Colorado and Wyoming,” said Dean of University Libraries and Senior Vice Provost of Online Education Robert McDonald. “This new contract provides flexibility for our libraries on cost but falls short on reducing costs for Elsevier’s open access publishing model for our campus.”
McDonald called the agreement “a step in the right direction” and noted that details can now be shared because the contract does not contain any non-disclosure agreements.
“However, our libraries stand in solidarity with others like the University of California campuses who have also recently signed a transformative publishing agreement with Elsevier,” McDonald said. “We hope that in future years we will also be able to push more boundaries on supporting open access publishing models for our researchers.”
There will be no price increase in the second year of the contract and an increase of no more than two percent in the new contract’s third year.
“Given our uncertain budget situation, this is important because it creates pricing predictability and contains costs for what has been an unsustainably priced journal package in the past,” said Associate Professor and Lead of Collections Management for the University Libraries Gabrielle Wiersma.
Negotiating the contract took about a year. The Alliance Elsevier Negotiating Team included members from University Libraries and the Boulder Faculty Assembly (BFA) and members of other Alliance research libraries.
“The CU Boulder faculty, and indeed faculty on the several campuses of the Alliance, all need to thank McDonald, Wiersma and the other members of the Alliance for their extraordinary efforts in these protracted negotiations,” said BFA chair Bob Ferry.
In future contracts, the Alliance will ask Elsevier to agree to open access elements such as reduced article processing charges or publication fees. These fees are charged to authors wishing to make their work more freely available through open access publishing models, which the author, the author’s institution or the author’s research funder typically pays for.
“We would like to get open access costs leveraged to obtain savings for everyone while encouraging the use of open access publishing models,” McDonald said. “In the meantime, we encourage authors to submit their work in CU Scholar, our campus institutional repository, to ensure open and long-term access to their publications.”
To learn more, download the contract from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Contracts Library.