Financial Times: “Mutinous Librarians Help Drive Change at Elsevier”

From the Financial Times (Subscribers Only):

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1m extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms Etschmaier remain in a minority, but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

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See Also: University of California Launches Systemwide Poll to “Gauge Impact of the Loss of Immediate Access to Current Elsevier Publishing Content via ScienceDirect”