California State University System Renegotiating Contract with Elsevier

From The Hornet (Student Newspaper at Sac State):

Sacramento State and the California State University system are currently in ongoing negotiations with Elsevier, a scholarly journal publishing company that licenses the ScienceDirect database to the CSU.

The CSU’s current contract with Elsevier terminates at the end of the year.

The CSU system is considering terminating its relationship with Elsevier because of the huge revenue and profit margin earnings Elsevier makes from their business as well as Elsevier not being flexible on open access for articles by CSU professors, said Amy Kautzman, dean and director of the Sac State Library.

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The CSU system paid nearly $4 million to Elsevier for use of ScienceDirect in 2019, a 4.5% increase from 2018. The Sac State Library paid $246,000 of the total, according to Kautzman.

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If the CSU system decides to drop Elsevier’s services, they will be following the UC’s [University of California] footsteps. The UC let its contract expire with Elsevier on Dec. 31, 2018.

Read the Complete Article [approx. 800 words]

Filed under: Elsevier, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing