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University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access (sciencemag.org)
The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced this week that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. From a report: Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide. The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.
Remember when they were caught selling fake journals with fake studies/articles to actual doctors, to get them to prescribe Merck pharmaceuticals to patients, even when that is a worse or dangerous choice?
Yeah, that is literal bodily harm and potentially murder ... for profit.
And a corporate culture like that does not just change. You can bet that that was just the tip of the iceberg.
So fuck Elsevier. In reality's eyes they are in one category with mass-murderers.
The UC system already requires that all works be deposited in their own OA system (https://escholarship.org/).
The reporting in this is a little vague - not sure if that's just the standard of journalism or intentional. The negotiations broke down because the UC system wanted Elsevier to waive their OA publishing fee since they were already paying an access fee (basically Elsevier want full access fees for journals with both closed and open articles), and Elsevier refused - they insist on being paid to on both ends by the UC system for OA articles (both for publishing costs and access costs).
Elsevier are fighting a losing battle for their livelihood here - the world is going OA, and once it does Elsevier (and their ScienceDirect platform which gate-keeps academic publishing metrics) is going to collapse. They're trying to squeeze every last cent out now, and if they give in to the UC system here, then every university on the planet will demand the same deal.
What is not clear right now is if the UC system is going to limit faculty involvement in Elsevier journals. At one point in the negotiations they had threatened to prevent UC faculty from being editors or reviewers for Elsevier journals. It is not clear if they can force that on Senate members (tenured faculty), but the Senate can force that on their own members (like they did the OA policy which precipitated this renegotiation). In addition to OA and access fees, Elsevier gets an in-kind contribution of millions of dollars in free labor from UC faculty.