Elsevier: Exemplary Customer Service
August 26, 2019
Academic publishers’ journals are expensive and are notoriously protective of their content. Elsevier is the country’s largest academic publisher as well as the biggest paywall perpetrator. California is big on low cost, effective education, particularly the University of California.
The University of California and Elsevier have butted heads over access for months, but in July 2019 Elsevier pulled the plug on recent research. The Los Angeles Times explains the details in the article, “In Act Of Brinkmanship, A Big Publisher Cuts Off UC’s Access To Its Academic Journals.”
Elsevier’s contract with UC expired in 2018. UC is willing to renegotiate a contract with Elsevier, but UC wants the new contract to include an open access clause, meaning all work produced on its campuses will be free to the public.
Academic publishers usually print scholarly material for free, but require expensive subscription fees to access content. UC wants to change the system to where researchers pay to have their papers published, but not for subscriptions. UC creates 10% of all published research in the US and is the largest producer of academic content in favor of open access.
Elsevier and other academic publishers are profit gluttons, while hiding behind pay walls. UC wants to continue its relationship with Elsevier, but the former agreement would raise subscription and access costs to exorbitant amounts. The University of California found its contract with Elsevier to be cost prohibitive, so they took a stand and demanded open access for UC research.
“UC isn’t the only institution to stage a frontal assault on this model. Open access has been spreading in academia and in scholarly publishing; academic consortiums in Germany and Sweden also have demanded read-and-publish deals with Elsevier, which cut them off after they failed to reach deals last year. Those researchers are still cut off, according to Gemma Hersh, Elsevier’s vice president for global policy. Smaller deals have been made in recent months with research institutions in Norway and Hungary.
We noted this statement:
….Under the circumstances, it looks like Elsevier may have picked a fight with the wrong adversary. While the open-access movement is growing, ‘the reality is that the majority of the world’s articles are still published under the subscription model, and there is a cost associated with reading those articles,’ Hersh says.”
The academic publishing paywall seems to be under siege. There is pressure to reduce costs in higher education and many professors and professional staff are demanding open access.
Elsevier may be perceived as mishandling its customers.
Whitney Grace, August 26, 2019
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