Elsevier has cancelled University of California access to new journal content

This follows the failure of negotiations in January on price and open access and is serious stuff for both sides.

While U Cal management and academic senate is solid, academics who now cannot get content from Elsevier’s Science Direct will not be happy. The best management could tell them Wednesday was; “over the coming months, the UC Libraries will be carefully evaluating the impact of losing access to new articles on Science Direct, and will do our best to ensure that members of the UC community have access to the articles they need.”

As for Elsevier, this is but one front in its war to defend its for-profit journals, which publish research generally produced with public funds. The publisher also faces the European Plan S which challenges the pay to read model and proposes a potentially less lucrative pay to publish model instead.

The company is diversifying its profit base, expanding services based on its vast research data resources, but it still prefers being the price maker.