SLU news
Negotiations with Elsevier
Published: 08 May 2018
Universities in Sweden have a joint agreement regarding access to journals from Elsevier. The contract is under negotiation and there is a risk that the stakeholders will not reach an agreement within the set time frame.
The National Library of Sweden coordinates agreements with publishers through a consortium. The agreement with Elsevier comprises about 2100 titles and in 2017 SLU payed over SEK six million for access to these. In many of the journals it is also possible to pay for Open Access publishing, something that SLU researchers did for the cost of almost SEK one million in 2017.
To stop the rising costs, and in order to support Open Access publishing, the consortium is now negotiating an agreement that aims to cover the costs for reading articles as well as publishing them. The negotiating parties are at the moment too far apart to reach an agreement. Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Vice-Chancellor at Stockholm University, is Chairperson of the consortium, and she and the other Vice-Chancellors in the consortium all agree that the costs must be lower.