After a year of negotiations, the Colorado State University Libraries recently agreed to a new three-year contract with scholarly publishing giant Elsevier, through the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries.

CSU researchers will continue to have access to the 2,300 journal titles from Elsevier currently available through the Libraries.

The East Carolina University Libraries recently completed contract negotiations with Elsevier, the largest publisher of scholarly journals in the world, for a customized journal package that includes the titles most critical for ECU faculty and students. For more than a decade, the ECU Libraries licensed Elsevier’s “Big Deal” Freedom Collection, but the cost of that collection was unsustainable in light of budget cuts and price increases. 

From CU Boulder, a thought-provoking quiz that gives a sense of how expensive commercial journal bundles really are. As you make your way through the quiz, you'll learn how scientific journals stack up in price compared to luxury yachts, fine art, and ski villas in Colorado resort towns, and you'll learn a bit about why journals are so expensive and what institutions like CU Boulder are doing to push back.

Our negotiation team met with Elsevier again this fall. After multiple rounds of proposal reviews that failed to address our needs, and much discussion and deliberation, we concluded that the only appropriate path forward was to commit to a one-year, title-by-title contract for 2021. This decision was informed by local usage data, as well as data from Unsub, a tool that identifies high value titles and projects future spending. The great news is that Unsub revealed a high rate of usage retention under the new title-by-title model.

Dear colleagues,

Following up on my message of September 18, 2020, and in response to the need to achieve the budget reduction target necessitated by the continuing financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Library, Museums and Press will cancel our bundled journal subscription with Elsevier Publishing. This single action will yield a savings of over $2M.

This year, Texas A&M University Libraries joined 43 Academic Libraries across Texas to create the Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA). The Coalition hopes to change current publishing models as well as the relationships between academic institutions and publishers, including academic publisher Elsevier.

[UT Austin's Provost announces] the creation of the Sustainable Open Scholarship Working Group, charged with articulating strategies for how UT Libraries can transform access to information resources in support of the university’s educational and research missions. [...]