Peak university lobbies in Australia and New Zealand have joined the trans-Tasman university libraries council to take a “unified position” in subscription negotiations with the publishers of thousands of scholarly journals, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Springer Nature, and John Wiley.
Commercial academic publishers have long used their production, distribution and analytics infrastructure to negotiate favourable terms from individual universities for subscriptions. Last year industry leader, RELX corporation reported £3.051bn global turnover for its scientific, technical, medical division (which includes Elsevier) with underlying profit of 38 per cent, $3.52bn in Australian dollars.
In the last decade the publishers have responded to protests at the cost of accessing their publications, especially in Europe and the United States, by moving from a “pay to read” business model to “pay to publish” charging fees for research articles in their journals.
The new ANZ alliance intends to negotiate better subscription terms for universities, providing open access for authors and readers.
The united front for new contracts builds on the Council of Australasian University Librarians recent success in making journal articles by Australian based academics free to read on publication, with publication charges included in university’s overall subscription costs. In the last contract negotiation it secured versions of this with all the big five (these four plus Sage).
And now it is back for another go. CAUL isn’t talking about what it wants but an end to caps on OA articles was floated in February. There were nearly 23,000 downloads in 2023.
