The University of California and Elsevier have come to an agreement on a transformative big deal: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-news-uc-secures-landmark-open-access-deal-world-s-largest-scientific-publisher
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe has a nice summary on Scholarly Kitchen: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/03/16/the-biggest-big-deal/
Short story – UC now has a deal with Elsevier that provides access to Elsevier’s journals for all UC schools, plus it includes open access publishing charges for all articles with a UC lead author.
UC says that this deal will cost less than their projected spend for library subscriptions plus APCs paid individually by authors (the former situation before UC walked away from negotiations in 2019).
UC has implemented a multi-payer model for handling APCs. The library pays the first $1000 of any APC. Authors with grant funding are asked to pay any difference between $1000 and the APC out of their grant funds. Authors without grant funds will have their entire APC paid by the library. Total library spend on APCs is capped with this new Elsevier deal. Finally, all authors are allowed to opt-out and publish their article as closed access with no APC.
It will be interesting to see how this informs the current negotiations between Elsevier and other schools, including the Texas Library Coalition for United Action.
