Showing posts with label scientific communication. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scientific communication. Show all posts

Friday, March 1, 2019

University of California boycotts publishing giant Elsevier over journal costs and open access; Science, February 28, 2019

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."