Cornell to Cancel Elsevier Subscriptions

Following hard on the heels of UC's decision not to renew their journal subscriptions to Elsevier, Cornell University seems poised to make a less extreme, but still noteworthy, cut of several hundred Elsevier titles. The impact of this cut will be felt not only by scholars at Cornell, but by other libraries who gain access to these titles by consortial arrangements.

http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/elsevier.html

Elsevier publishes a large number of scholarly journals. While commercial publishers have indeed been raising their prices at rates far greater than the increases in library budgets for many years, we in the Library have often been able to conceal this problem by canceling other journals, reducing purchases of monographs, and general reallocations. The total cost of our Elsevier subscriptions is now so high (because there are so many of them), however, that this is no longer possible. We now pay ca. $1.7 million dollars for Elsevier journals. (Those journals account for less than 2% of the serials to which the Cornell Library subscribes, but that cost is equal to over 20% of the Library's total serials expenditures including the Medical School.) When Elsevier raises its annual prices, therefore, at rates that are invariably much greater than the rate of increase in our budget, the total dollar amount of that price increase has now become so large that we can no longer accommodate it. In that case, you might assume, we will simply need to cancel some of those Elsevier journals-but that leads to the other major challenge of the Elsevier subscription.

Elsevier has priced its journals in such a way that, if a library cancels anything it is currently subscribing to, the pricing of the individual journals the library keeps increases substantially. (The actual process is somewhat more complicated than this, but this is the end result.) Because the prices of the journals we retain greatly increase when we cancel, the only way to save any real money is to cancel a great many journals - inevitably eliminating access to some journals that scholars and students depend upon. This is an understandable pricing strategy on Elsevier's part (and a perfectly legal one - we've checked); but it is also, of course, very risky, because if we reach a situation in which we absolutely must save money, then we will have no choice but to cancel a great many Elsevier journals.

It is now nearly 2004, and the need to undertake such a cancellation effort has arrived. We can no longer subscribe to so many Elsevier journals (including duplicates) that we no longer need. We must now free up some of the money spent on Elsevier journals to pay for journals published by other publishers that are more needed by our users. We have explained this to Elsevier in lengthy discussions, both through our research library consortium and then independently. We have tried in these discussions to broker an arrangement that would allow us to cancel some Elsevier titles without such a large price increase to the titles remaining - but Elsevier has been unwilling to accept any of our proposals.

Posted by Tom on November 12, 2003