Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees

[Andy]

The Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has granted uninterrupted access to its paywalled journals for researchers at around 200 German universities and research institutes that had refused to renew their individual subscriptions at the end of 2017.

The institutions had formed a consortium to negotiate a nationwide licence with the publisher. They sought a collective deal that would give most scientists in Germany full online access to about 2,500 journals at about half the price that individual libraries have paid in the past. But talks broke down and, by the end of 2017, no deal had been agreed . Elsevier now says that it will allow the country’s scientists to access its paywalled journals without a contract until a national agreement is hammered out.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00093-7

 

[Allele]

W00t! Now a global action to this end!

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

All that universities need to do is to publish their academics' work for free on their own university website (costs nothing). They could also have a rule that their academics would only cite papers published the same way (plus open access for an interim period). Elsevier then goes to the wall and everyone else is happy.

There would be no problem about grading quality. The websites can have comments fields as PLOSOne does and if your paper gets a comment 'good for a Nobel, best wishes Albert Einstein' ' then you get 100 pips on the score sheet.

 

[Valentijn]

Günter Ziegler, a mathematician at the Free University of Berlin and a member of the consortium's negotiating team, says that German researchers have the upper hand in the negotiations. “Most papers are now freely available somewhere on the Internet, or else you might choose to work with preprint versions,” he says. “Clearly our negotiating position is strong. It is not clear that we want or need a paid extension of the old contracts.”

Sci-hub has been the major factor in that availability