U. of California and Elsevier – “A Win for Open Access”

If you haven’t heard the news, the University of California announced that they would be terminating their contract with Elsevier – one of the world’s largest and most profitable publishers of academic research.

This is a big deal for many reasons – Elsevier, because it is a huge publisher of academic research, provides libraries access to many journal subscriptions for a large sum of money. Many libraries (if not all?) are struggling financially to pay the large amounts of money wanted by publishers, like Elsevier, and are having to make tough choices about what materials they will have to cut. There is also a lot of irony in the academic publishing model, because researchers at universities are developing the research and writing the articles which get published – and those published articles are not accessible to them (or anyone) unless they pay the publisher for them. So researchers are writing the articles (which costs the publisher nothing), typically pay to get them published, and then have to pay to be able to read them once they are published. (Yes, so many problems with this model…)

These problems with the traditional publishing model is why open access is so important. And it’s why when a large school like the University of California decides to take a stand against the traditional model, it’s a big deal!

You can read the announcement about the cancellation at the University of California’s website here.

The University of California also posted a great article about ways to find the articles you need, without using Elsevier. The infographic to the left comes from the article and summarizes the article nicely.