Don’t fear losing Elsevier access, California negotiator tells UK

UK universities should not fear being cut off from Elsevier journals if the stand-off over a new deal with the publisher continues into next year, according to the University of California’s lead negotiator.

They were well placed to cope with not having access for an extended period, said Jeff MacKie-Mason, who co-chaired California’s task force when it walked away from negotiations with the Dutch publishing giant in 2019, leading to nearly two years without direct access to Elsevier content until an open access deal was struck in March 2021.

“If UK universities prepare, as we did, they should be able to sustain as long, or longer, a subscription stand-off,” Professor MacKie-Mason told Times Higher Education.

Talks continue between Elsevier and UK universities about a new five-year deal, but last month university leaders publicly rejected Elsevier’s latest proposals, saying the terms did not meet their core goals on reducing costs and achieving “full and immediate open access to UK research”.

That raises the possibility that the UK might soon join major sectors such as California and Germany that have forgone access to Elsevier journals for lengthy periods.

This prospect should not alarm UK universities given the workarounds that California’s libraries used to enable access to key Elsevier papers, insisted Professor MacKie-Mason, university librarian at the University of California, Berkeley.

“All in all, we didn’t face major difficulties, and were prepared to continue without an agreement for considerably longer if Elsevier did not meet our requirements,” said Professor MacKie-Mason, who said that there was “strong support from UC faculty” during the 21 months the system had no access to Elsevier titles, and that “research productivity did not decline”.

California’s researchers were able to circumvent the loss of direct reading access because a “high fraction of articles are available in post-peer-review, author-accepted manuscript form – usually as PDFs – either from archival servers or directly from authors, who are happy to share their work with readers,” he explained.

A “modest additional fraction” were available because authors or their institutions had paid extra charges to secure open access publishing, while “with modest delay, readers can obtain copies of individual articles through interlibrary loan programmes”.

The “last resort” for papers not available through these channels involved the direct purchase of articles, but this accounted for “well below 1 per cent of all demand” for Elsevier papers. “All of these methods are legal and were unchallenged by Elsevier,” Professor MacKie-Mason said.

Liam Earney, executive director of digital resources at Jisc, which is conducting the UK’s Elsevier negotiations, told THE that “the sector has been preparing for all outcomes, including if the negotiations continue beyond December”. He added that it was “continuing constructive negotiations with Elsevier to secure the right deal for our members”.

But Rick Anderson, university librarian at Brigham Young University, said it was “instructive” to look at the survey of German researchers that Elsevier commissioned in 2019, a year after those researchers lost institutional access to Elsevier journals.

“The survey found, among other things, that 75 per cent of respondents wanted access to Elsevier content restored, while 7 per cent didn’t,” said Mr Anderson.

“Even if Elsevier’s commissioning of the study led to bias in its construction – which may or may not be the case – that number would have to be wildly, wildly askew for it not to be sending a message that the UK universities need to think about,” he said.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com