Annex
CHANGES IN
ELSEVIER SCIENCE
ACCESS
As many of you know, the member universities
of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) have decided
to discontinue the consortial arrangement by which they provided
access to electronic journals published under the Elsevier Science
imprint. This move follows months of unsuccessful negotiations
by the TRLN libraries with Reed-Elsevier. We recognize that reduced
availability of the many prominent science and technology journals
published by Elsevier will impose an inconvenience on faculty
members and students accustomed to the current arrangement. We
believe, however, that the negotiating position adopted by Reed-Elsevier
leaves no other option. This memo explains our decision and reaffirms
our support of it.
Background
Since 2000, our universities, acting through
TRLN, have purchased electronic access to a bundled journal package
from Elsevier Science. This package included electronic versions
of all the subscriptions held by each university, or approximately
1,300 journals. As a benefit of consortial purchasing, all 1,300
electronic titles have been available to affiliates of every TRLN
library, whether or not a given library purchased the print subscription.
The contract providing this access expired on December 31, 2003.
Throughout months of renewal negotiations with
Elsevier, TRLN and its member libraries have articulated two principal
objectives:
To regain and maintain control over
library collecting decisions in order to meet the constantly evolving
information needs of faculty, researchers, and students; and
To manage overall costs in order
to keep Elsevier expenditures consistent with materials budgets
that have not been increasing at anywhere near Elsevier's annual
inflation rate.
Elsevier's final offer fails to meet both of
these objectives.
In the first place, Elsevier has insisted that
each library commit to a policy of zero cancellations over the
life of the license. This would not only lock the consortium into
an inflexible collection policy, but would inordinately privilege
the journals of a single publisher. In order to maintain Elsevier
subscriptions, journals from other publishers and in other disciplines
would have to be canceled. The result would be a growing imbalance
in library collections. We are additionally concerned about the
detrimental effect such a commitment would have on the scholarly
associations and society publishers whose journals would become
especially vulnerable to cancellation.
The effects of this provision would only be
magnified by Elsevier's additional insistence on significant annual
cost increases above TRLN's current contract terms. The consortium
currently spends in excess of $4.5 million annually with the company.
The revised inflationary rates, coupled with no-cancellation policies,
are economically unsustainable for TRLN's member libraries.
Outcome
Because Elsevier Science has not offered TRLN
a pricing model responsive to the needs of the consortium, TRLN
has elected to terminate its consortial arrangement with Reed
Elsevier. Each TRLN library will now make individual arrangements
for Elsevier journal access on its own campus. One consequence
of this move will be the loss of electronic access to the body
of titles shared throughout TRLN, resulting in a reduction in
access to 400-500 journals per campus. In addition, each library
will also need to cancel locally held subscriptions in order to
offset the substantial price increases that Elsevier imposes on
single institutions for electronic access.
National Context
The breakdown of negotiation with Elsevier is
only the most extreme symptom of a much larger problem. Academic
libraries across the country have faced escalating costs to sustain
the scholarly communication system for years. The Association
of Research Libraries reports that, over the past fifteen years,
serial costs for member libraries have increased 215% while the
Consumer Price Index has increased by only 62%. Although libraries
and universities are supporting new publishing models in an effort
to maintain access to high-quality, peer-reviewed research at
a manageable cost, there is still a reliance on the products of
for-profit publishers. As a result of this dynamic, libraries
can no longer offer the same range of publications to the academic
community.
It is our understanding that Cornell and Harvard
have also rejected the multi-year, no-cancellation model for access
to Reed Elsevier journals and are making arrangements similar
to TRLN for access to a more limited collection of titles. We
also understand that the University of California continues to
negotiate over the same provisions and has yet to sign a multi-year
license with the terms imposed by Elsevier.
Our commitment
We firmly believe that universities must respond
to this economic crisis of the state of scholarly communication.
Libraries must be empowered, through dialogue with the university
community, to obtain appropriate research material without sacrificing
content and budgetary decisions to the publisher. Future library
negotiations should follow the principles adhered to in this particular
process, that libraries must make collection decisions and manage
costs.
In the immediate term, our libraries will work
with you to minimize the impact of this particular decision on
your research and teaching. The libraries will cooperate through
the TRLN consortium and with other research libraries to deliver
copies of articles in canceled journals to you in a timely way
and to cover any reasonable costs, including royalties, for access
to those articles. At the same time, they will begin to explore
with you new models of scholarly communication that may, in the
long term, help reduce costs and make scholarly information more
widely available.
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