There are new Australian agreements with all sorts of scholarly publishers – just not the biggest

The cost of content from for-profit journal giant Elsevier will drop for UK universities under a deal done by negotiating agency JISC. It appears research from participating universities will be open access up-front and while what this means for article processing charges and subscription costs is not apparent, JISC states the arrangement will provide “a significant reduction” in member spends (CMM March 25).

So what will happen here? The Council of Australian University Librarians has struck deals with a plethora of publishers that make research by academics at member institutions open access and without pay to publish – all charges are covered by subscription costs.

But Elsevier is not one of them. So CMM asked CAUL if  the UK deal indicates the shape of talks to come.

To which the council replied, it is “finalising the strategy and negotiation principles in preparation for the next round of discussions with publishers with the potential for further Open Access agreements.

“Publishers targeted for these discussions include large publishers such as Elsevier and others, as well as medium and small publishers, across a range of STEM and HASS disciplines.