Australia and New Zealand strike open access deal with Elsevier

Universities in Australia and New Zealand have notched their biggest “transformative agreement” so far after negotiating a partial open access deal with publishing giant Elsevier.

The three-year agreement takes effect in January. It allows Australasian researchers who are accepted for publication in Elsevier journals to make their articles available via open access (OA), without incurring extra article processing charges, as long as they work for universities that subscribe to the journals.

The arrangement covers Elsevier’s “hybrid” journals which contain both OA and pay-to-view articles. The publisher said “nearly all” all of its 2,800 journals were either hybrid or fully OA.

The deal was negotiated by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), which represents 47 institutions in Australia and New Zealand. It has emerged three weeks after a similar arrangement was struck with scholarly publisher Taylor & Francis, and about a year after CAUL unveiled transformative agreements with Cambridge University Press, Springer Nature, Oxford University Press and Wiley.

Times Higher Education understands that CAUL has also agreed terms with Sage Publishing, locking all of the major academic publishers into “read and publish” deals. CAUL board member Bob Gerrity, who chairs the council’s content procurement committee, said the pact with Elsevier was the biggest by far. “It’s more than twice the value of any of the other agreements,” he said.

As with other publishers, CAUL-affiliated universities must opt into the Elsevier deal. Most are expected to do so, as it does not require them to pay any more in subscription charges, although some may be wary of committing to three-year subscriptions.

The arrangement covers 60 per cent of the Australasian research articles expected to be published by Elsevier in 2023, rising to 80 per cent in 2024 and 100 per cent in 2025. “It doesn’t get us where we want to be immediately,” said Mr Gerrity, university librarian at Monash University. “But it does by the third year.

“We see this agreement with Elsevier as a vital step in providing greater value to researchers in Australia and New Zealand…We will continue to work with Elsevier to evolve this agreement to meet the needs of individual universities and their different research profiles.”

Elsevier senior vice-president Gemma Hersh said the publisher was “grateful to CAUL for their partnership and pragmatism”.

The deal announced last month, which also lasts for three years and starts in January, applies to hybrid journals in the Taylor & Francis and Routledge stables. Taylor & Francis vice-president Ian Jones said it would contribute to the publisher’s and CAUL’s “shared goal” of supporting OA.

“There’s lots of exciting research coming out of Australia and New Zealand and we look forward to seeing OA help maximise its reach and impact,” he said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com