Alex Fox, Jeffrey Brainard, Science; University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and open access
"The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced today it
will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the
world’s largest scientific publisher, headquartered in Amsterdam. Talks
to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because
Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on
subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors
immediately free for readers worldwide.
The stand by UC, which followed 8 months of negotiations, could have
significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the
so-called open-access movement, in the United States and beyond. The
10-campus system accounts for nearly 10% of all U.S. publishing output
and is among the first U.S. institutions, and by far the largest, to
boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at
U.S. universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as
excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial
publishers."
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