Elsevier Tries To Lie About University Of California's Contract Negotiation; UC Shows Its Receipts

from the don't-fuck-with-uc dept

You may recall that, back in March, we were excited to hear the news that the University of California had cancelled its Elsevier subscription, after Elsevier was unwilling to support UC's goal of universal open access to all of its research (while simultaneously cutting back on the insane costs that Elsevier charged). Apparently the fight between Elsevier and UC has continued, and it's getting nasty. Recently, UC put out a blog post that accused Elsevier of playing dirty and making a bunch of bullshit claims about UC and the negotiations:

Elsevier also asserts that it “proposed a series of arrangements that would contain costs.” Elsevier’s proposal would only have contained costs under the narrowest of interpretations, in which two-thirds of UC-authored articles would remain behind Elsevier’s paywall. To meet UC’s goal of making all UC research freely accessible, the final proposal from Elsevier would have cost UC 80 percent more than its most recent agreement A point Elsevier has made repeatedly is that they offered UC “a five-fold increase in open access publishing.” Elsevier’s offer to increase open access publishing “five-fold” would have resulted in only 30 percent of UC’s research, all of which is supported by public funding, being freely available to the public. Under the past Elsevier contract, which required UC authors to pay an additional charge for open access (after the libraries already paid Elsevier for subscriptions), only 6 percent of UC authors made that second payment — making the majority of UC research published in Elsevier journals inaccessible to the public who helped fund it. The publisher states that it has “opened over 1,900 of its subscription journals to open access submissions.” Elsevier has not “opened” its subscription journals. Rather, it is asking authors, after the libraries have already paid Elsevier for subscriptions, to pay a second charge (generally thousands of dollars) if authors want their individual articles to be available open access. Under this model, Elsevier gets paid twice for publishing such articles.

It goes on like this for a while. Given Elsevier's long history of sketchy practices, it probably should have thought better than sending out emails to people lying about what was happening with UC, but this is Elsevier that we're talking about: when has it ever "thought better"?

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Filed Under: university of california

Companies: elsevier