UNC Chapel Hill and SUNY Part Ways With Elsevier Deals

Inside HigherEd: “The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill will not renew its bundled journal subscription deal with publisher Elsevier. Elaine Westbrooks, university librarian at UNC Chapel Hill, tweeted yesterday that the two parties failed to reach a deal after more than a year of negotiation. The institution’s current subscription package with instant access to around 2,000 journals is set to expire April 30. “I tried to work with Elsevier but we had no choice but to break our big deal,” tweeted Westbrooks. “We are free to select what titles we want. No more ‘cable packages’ of journals that we don’t read or value.”
“The State University of New York (SUNY) has opted not to renew its “big deal” with Elsevier for ScienceDirect in favor of a short list of titles to which campuses across the system will have access. SUNY is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, and its negotiation efforts were led by the SUNY Libraries Consortia (SLC) over a period of a year-and-a-half. While both parties negotiated in earnest and tried to come to acceptable terms for SUNY to maintain access to the full ScienceDirect package, in the end there was considerable disagreement around the value proposition of the “big deal”. While Elsevier did make some accommodations in recognition of our requirements, a vast difference remained between their proposed charges and our assessment of the value of the collection…”