The Chronicle of Higher Education: In Talks With Elsevier, UCLA Reaches for a Novel Bargaining Chip: Its Faculty “…In a letter on Tuesday, campus officials asked faculty members to consider declining to review articles for Elsevier journals until contract negotiations “are clearly moving in a productive direction.” The letter also asked professors to consider publishing research elsewhere, including in prestigious open-access journals. The university system has said it wants to reach an agreement that would be less expensive and would simplify open-access publishing. But time for negotiations is running out: The contract expires on December 31.

“The only thing that the publishers have is the content authors give to them,” said Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, university librarian at the University of California at Berkeley and a professor of economics and information, who is helping to lead the negotiations. “What they’re selling is access to research. If they don’t have the research, they have nothing to sell.”…The UC system’s five-year contract with Elsevier costs the system about $50 million…”