Earlier this year, the University of California (UC) made headlines when it chose to end its journal licensing deal with publishing giant Elsevier. The UC negotiation team recently released a toolkit for other institutions wishing to make changes to their own publishing agreements. The following announcement of the toolkit is excerpted from a post on the University of California (UC) Office of Scholarly Communication website, which originally appeared in May 2019 under a CC-BY license.
The University of California’s (UC) 2018-19 journal contract negotiation with Elsevier has been widely followed. In response to ongoing demand for information, this negotiation toolkit was created to provide support and insight for institutions, particularly university librarians/directors and faculty in North America, interested in restructuring their publisher contracts for journal content.
[The toolkit provides] a North American framework for creating transformative change in the scholarly publishing industry based on initial insights from the University of California’s 2018-2019 negotiations with Elsevier.
A printer-friendly version of this toolkit is available as a PDF.
Authors Alliance is committed to updating our readers on new developments in open access and scholarly publishing policies. Our OA resource page features information and tools about OA publishing, including our Guide to Understanding Open Access. Earlier this spring, we featured an interview with Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, an Authors Alliance board member and one of the lead negotiators in the effort to restructure UC’s contracts with Elsevier.