This decision was taken in agreement with the management of the higher education institutions in Bremen. DEAL’s negotiating group, consisting of representatives of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) and library directors, is pursuing the goal of a nationwide, sustainable publish-and-read model. The model aims to provide access to the entire portfolio of electronic journals (e-journals) published by major scientific publishers by concluding nationwide license agreements. Consortium agreements at federal level are intended to relieve the financial burden on the individual facilities and improve access to academic literature for science on a broader and more sustainable basis. At the same time, an open access component will be set up so that publications by authors from German facilities are automatically switched to open access (CC BY license including peer review). Negotiations will be carried out with publishers Springer Nature, Wiley, and Elsevier.
Negotiations with Elsevier Suspended for Now
In this context, negotiations with Elsevier were suspended for the time being at the beginning of July. The President of the HRK stated in a press release dated July 5, 2018 that Elsevier was not prepared to offer services suitable for the scientific community under the principles of open access, which could be financed sustainably.
No Online Access to Articles Published in 2018
Elsevier has now blocked access that was previously open despite termination. Online access to journals published by Elsevier is therefore only possible to a limited extent. Members of state higher education institutions in Bremen will continue to have online access to articles from the journals that are permanently licensed by SuUB and that were published by the end of 2017. All articles published since 2018 are no longer accessible. All articles from the approximately 1,500 journal titles in the Freedom Collection licensed by SuUB are also no longer accessible, since this license did not contain any archive rights.
What’s the Next Step?
SuUB has updated the catalog references and licensing information for the Elsevier journals and offers members of the Bremen higher education institutions the opportunity to obtain the articles that are no longer available free of charge via document delivery. Further information can be found on the library websites.
Additional Information:
Press release about the German Rectors’ Conference (July 5, 2018)
Information from SuUB about the DEAL project and Elsevier journals
“No more paying to read”: Horst Hippler (President of the HRK) in conversation with Rolf Krauter (interview on Deutschlandfunk radio on December 20, 2017).
