Source: Radio New Zealand
Universities could lose access to more than 1000 journals. (File photo) 123RF
Thousands of academics and students in New Zealand and Australia are poised to lose access to critical research journals next year.
Negotiations between the Council of Australasian University Librarians and academic publishing giant Elsevier have broken down in what academic described as universities’ “battle of the century”.
The council announced on Friday, it had “paused” talks with Elsevier over a contract covering all of the two nations’ universities.
“CAUL has paused discussions with Elsevier after both parties were unable to reach agreement on major commercial terms, including pricing, agreement structure and inclusion of gold open access journals,” it said in a statement.
One New Zealand university told its staff all universities in New Zealand and Australia would “lose some degree of access” to Elsevier’s 1600 titles from the start of next year.
Another said New Zealand’s eight universities spent $30-million a year on journal licences and about half of that sum went to Elsevier.
Academics told RNZ universities were playing hardball and the negotiations were a “battle of the century” with publishers.
CAUL also announced it had sealed a deal with another of the major research journal publishers, Taylor & Francis.
“The agreement means that all Australian and New Zealand university research published by Taylor & Francis can be freely accessed by members of the public,” it said.
“The deal with Taylor & Francis is the first to be struck under CAUL’s new negotiation framework, established in response to mounting pressure on university budgets and growing concern about the rising cost of open access publishing.”
Universities New Zealand chief executive Chris Whelan said universities wanted a better deal from the various publishing companies.
“Until now, each individual university across Australasia, Australia and New Zealand, has had their own licence agreement with the big academic publishers. What we’ve been doing is entering into collective negotiations to see if we can get a better return for taxpayer funds,” he said.
Whelan said universities had individual contracts with Elsevier so the expiry of the contracts would affect each institution differently.
“It’s highly likely that some universities will be losing access to Elsevier journals from the start of the new year, others will have as part of their agreement continued access on some sort of basis,” he said.
Whelan said the universities wanted free public access to the research their taxes had funded.
“We have a mutually-beneficial relationship with these publishers. We need them to be able to publish and for other researchers to be able to access knowledge and build on it so they play an important part in the research ecosystem,” he said.
“But on the flip side, their research is hidden behind paywalls. If you’re a member of a university community your library will have a have a licence to access it. But members of the public generally can’t see behind those payrolls. So there’s a lot of research that ultimately has been paid for by New Zealand.”
Association of Scientists co-president Troy Baisden said the negotiations were the battle of the century for universities, whose staff wrote, edited and peer reviewed articles for various journals, often for free.
Association of Scientists co-president Troy Baisden said universities would play “hardball”. (File photo) Waikato University
“The cost of library subscriptions to these major journal houses is one of the most broken issues that universities face. It was built up in the 20th century and needs to be fixed in some way in the 21st century,” he said.
“Universities are going to play hardball, and they’ve had a long-term plan to try to get these costs under control.”
Baisden said New Zealand universities already had a system for ensuring the public had free access to their research.
But he said universities and academics were tied into the journal-publishing world because publication in prestigious journals helped with international rankings and promotion.
RNZ has approached Elsevier for comment.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
