Canada-wide analysis of serials usage.

Negotiators fail to reach a deal with Oxford University Press over transition to open access

Louisiana State University (LSU) filed a lawsuit on February 27, 2017, against international science publisher Elsevier B.V. for breach of contract resulting from the publisher’s exclusion of the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine from accessing content licensed by the LSU Libraries. In filing the lawsuit, LSU exercised sound financial stewardship of its public resources...

The universities in the Netherlands and Oxford University Press (OUP) have been unable to reach a new agreement for access ...

The debate about green versus gold open access leaves aside a more fundamental difference: that between legal open access and pirate open ac...

Canadian institution makes move in bid to save C$1.5 million in fees

Faced with shrinking budgets and increased subscription prices, many academic libraries are seeking ways to reduce the cost of e-journal access. A common target for cuts is the “Big Deal,” or large bundled subscription model, a term coined by Kenneth Frazier in a 2001 paper criticizing the effects of the Big Deal on the academic community. The purpose of this literature review is to examine issues related to reducing e-journal costs, including criteria for subscription retention or cancellation, decision-making strategies, impacts of cancellations, and other options for e-journal content provision. Commonly used criteria for decision-making include usage statistics, overlap analysis, and input from subject specialists. The most commonly used strategy for guiding the process and aggregating data is the rubric or decision grid. While the e-journal landscape supports several access models, such as Pay-Per-View, cloud access, and interlibrary loan, the Big Deal continues to dominate. Trends over the past several years point to dwindling support for the Big Deal however, due largely to significant annual rate increases and loss of content control.

Germany’s DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier’s academic and sci…

Die Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina berät Politik und Gesellschaft unabhängig zu wichtigen Zukunftsthemen.

The library of National Taiwan University (NTU) published a notice on its website saying that from 2017, it planned to discontinue its subscriptions to Elsevier’s ScienceDirect journals, citing high subscription costs as the main reason behind this decision.

This post is principally addressed to academics in the UK, though some of it may apply to people in other countries too. The current deal that the universities have with Elsevier expires at the end…

UMontreal faculty union votes in a labor boycott for Springer.

All but one member of the editorial advisory committee for Australia's top medical journal have resigned following the sacking of its eminent editor who raised concerns about a decision to outsource its production to controversial global publisher, Elsevier.

Last month, the University of Ottawa released a strategy to cut costs by reducing spending on subscriptions to thousands of online and print journals and databases to meet the balance of $1.527 million by Dec. 2016.