FSU Cancels Bundled Journal Deal

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/04/26/florida-state-cancels-bundled-journal-deal-elsevier

Florida State University will cancel its comprehensive subscription to Elsevier journals.

Julia Zimmerman, dean of university libraries at Florida State, released a statement saying the decision to cancel the libraries’ “big deal” with Elsevier had been made after “long deliberation.”

“FSU is being charged too much -- all because of a poorly thought-out 20-year-old contract between Elsevier and the State University System,” said Zimmerman. Florida currently pays just under $2 million a year for access to Elsevier content. She said other public universities are paying much less for the same content.

Zimmerman said that Florida had tried “every possible way” to negotiate a better deal, without success. “A partial cancellation is our only remaining option,” she said.

From January 2019, FSU will only subscribe to a subset of “most-needed journals” from Elsevier. Zimmerman said the cancellation would enable the library to acquire other materials requested by faculty, which had previously been denied.

This is not the first time that Florida State University has canceled a “big deal” with a publisher, according to SPARC’s Big Deal Cancellation Tracking resource. The institution canceled its Springer Nature package in 2015 after it transpired that FSU was being charged several times more than other Florida universities for the same product.

The Elsevier contract was based on enrollment at the time it was signed. Since then, some Florida universities have grown at faster rates than has Florida State.

A spokesman for the company said via email, "Elsevier provides different options for its customers, including all access options such as the Freedom Collection, as well as title by title options that provide customers flexibility to choose the most appropriate titles for their collections. We will look to work with FSU on the options that best meet the balance of their collection needs and costs."

pquincy • 3 days ago

My understanding is that the financially aggressive publishers such as Elsevier and Springer routinely use "divide to conquer" strategies with universities and university systems: failing to list standard prices, insisting on confidential negotiations and cloaking actual costs as "business secrets", and generally doing as much as possible to squeeze universities one at a time so as to extract the highest possible rent from their state-licensed temporary monopoly. It's also my understanding that these publishers are extraordinarily profitable and pay very high executive salaries.

If these understandings are incorrect, I'm happy to be educated. In the meantime, as a researcher, I'll put up with the occasional hassle of not having immediate free access to certain journals or publishers in exchange for my university system saving millions on the relevant contracts. It makes more sense to invest modest amounts into our great interlibrary loan department rather than succumbing to rapacious practices. And I'm also happy my university system uses the fact that many many of its faculty serve as editors and peer-reviewers to push back against exaggerated demands from the publishing monopolists, and is building up a sensible open-access repository for as much of our own publication as possible.

Negotiation is legitimate and necessary in this space (and the publishers do have every right to seek a reasonable profit, too). Sometimes walking out of the room, as FSU has done here, will be a good negotiating tactic.