Provosts' Memo Re: Changes in Elsevier Science Access
January 8, 2004
MEMORANDUM
From: Peter Lange, Provost, Duke University
James Oblinger, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, NCSU
Robert Shelton, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UNC-Chapel Hill
To: Faculties of: Duke University
North Carolina State University
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Re: 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:
1. To regain and maintain control over library collecting decisions in
order to meet the constantly evolving information needs of faculty,
researchers, and students; and
2. 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.
