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The Scholarly Kitchen Responds to the University of California's OA Agreement With Elsevier

The University of California (UC) announced … a four-year arrangement with Elsevier that is the biggest transformative agreement in North America by article count as well as financial spend. This agreement achieves UC’s goal of an integrated contract for reading access and open access publishing. It will be a test of both the financial sustainability and the financial desirability of the multi-payer model. …

The base of the agreement is a capped payment by the libraries for open access publishing, which starts at $10.7 million in the first year and grows by 2.6% per year. Under the agreement, approximately 4,400 articles will be published open access annually. This will grow to approximately 4,700 when publishing in Lancet and Cell titles is enabled in year three of the agreement. It is worth noting that this can be enabled earlier at UC’s discretion. Reading access for Elsevier’s subscription journal content is included at no additional expense. …

For Elsevier, then, this agreement means that they re-gain a substantial portion of the revenues they had lost when UC canceled its subscription in 2019. …

Other universities and their libraries will be scrutinizing this newest agreement. Will it unleash a flood of transformative agreements among major US institutions? Will UC thereby establish the multi-payer institutional model as the US counterweight to the European and Asian national deals?

For more information, read the blog post.