Jason Priem tells of his hopes for a ‘long-overdue’ change in academic publishing

Well-done advocacy from UL Geffert.

The publishing giant will likely survive the latest boycott by scientists. An overhaul is needed to make science publishing fair and open.

After more than two years of negotiations, in March 2021 the University of California announced a transformative open access agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. This successful outcome is the result of UC’s faculty, librarians and university leadership coming together to stand firm on the goals of making UC research freely available to all and transforming scholarly communication for the better. The four-year agreement goes into effect on April 1, 2021, restoring UC’s direct online access to Elsevier journals while accomplishing the university’s two goals for all publisher agreements: (1)   Enabling universal open access to all UC […]

Six members of the Virginia Research Libraries (VRL) group recently completed contract negotiations with Elsevier, the largest publisher of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) scholar…

Academic libraries around the world are cancelling big deal journal subscriptions at an increasing rate. This is primarily due to budgetary challenges, the unsustainable hyperinflationary pricing of these packages, and a need to move toward new open access models. It is a complex situation with many vested interests and stakeholders. Some libraries have been the target of angry backlash from faculty after such cancellations. The purpose of this qualitative study is to discover strategies for communicating to the campus community about collections cancellations so that they will better understand and support the library in making these difficult decisions.

This exploratory study analyzed the specific crisis communication methods of academic libraries. A survey was sent to library staff at Association of Research Libraries-member colleges and universities to describe if, who, when, and how they communicated bad news to their stakeholders for major, minor, and emerging crises. The findings show that respondents used multiple communication strategies, which varied based on the crisis. The data show that libraries communicated journal and database cancellations and health and safety emergencies more slowly than access issues and were more likely not to communicate those crises at all. Respondents also more frequently chose to communicate journal and database cancellations only when asked as compared to other crises. While access issues and health and safety emergencies were primarily communicated through social media and the library’s website, stakeholders received communication about journal and database cancellations primarily through targeted emails from library liaisons, face-to-face meetings with faculty, and the library’s website. These findings suggest that respondents communicated more quickly for minor crises but were more hesitant for crises that may have presented the potential for reputational harm. The varied responses between crisis types often conflicted with best practices for whether to deliver bad news, and if so, when and by whom. These findings indicate a need for academic libraries to develop comprehensive crisis communication plans which emphasize timeliness and transparency.

Article: Swedish researchers’ responses to the cancellation of the big deal with Elsevier

This is a BOMBSHELL, holy crap.

THE NEXT BIG DEAL I live and work in Winnipeg, in the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, Métis, and Oji-Cree Nations. Treaty 1, signed in 1871, took this territory from seven local Anishinaabe First Nations in order to make the land available for settler use and ownership. Winni...

UVA Library's source for information about copyright and publication issues

Springer Nature’s agreement with the University of California portends US adoption of a publishing practice that is becoming commonplace in Europe.

A "Big Deal" is a bundle of journals that is offered to libraries by publishers as a "one-price, one size fits all package" (Frazier, 2001). There have been several accounts of Big Deals...

The profound and ongoing effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic on higher education in the UK and worldwide are well documented. The Collections Strategy Network, consisting of representatives of all of the RLUK members, today issues a statement outlining the position of RLUK libraries as they navigate the issues raised by the pandemic. It lists a series of requirements around databases and journal subscriptions, e-books and e-textbooks, and access to resources that will need to be met to ensure libraries can continue to fulfil the information needs of researchers and students.

As universities look for savings, new software helps reimagine deals with publishers

One of the oft-repeated adages in the scholarly communications world is that ‘the money is in the system’, it’s just badly distributed. This is one of the core problems with APCs; they don’t distribute funds in a similar way to subscriptions, so even if we could afford it, we still have a problematic distribution.