Fact check: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier - Office of Scholarly Communication

"Elsevier claims that it “proposed a series of arrangements that would…achieve the objectives of the Academic Senate.”1

Not so, according to the leadership of the Academic Senate itself. ...

The publisher states that it has “opened over 1,900 of its subscription journals to open access submissions.”12

Elsevier has not “opened” its subscription journals. Rather, it is asking authors, after the libraries have already paid Elsevier for subscriptions, to pay a second charge (generally thousands of dollars) if authors want their individual articles to be available open access. Under this model, Elsevier gets paid twice for publishing such articles....

Elsevier asserts that UC’s proposed model is, “in their own words … complex and risky,” using as evidence a mischaracterized quote from the UC Davis university librarian. A representative of the company wrote: “The plan is so intricate that one senior UC librarian called it ‘akin to modernizing the FAA’s air traffic control system – a million planes are in the air at any moment and changing anything can have serious consequences elsewhere.’”20

We have not characterized our offer as “complex and risky.” The quote Elsevier references describes the complexity of transforming the entire scholarly publishing industry, not UC’s proposal to Elsevier....

Elsevier confusingly states that the university’s “proposed plan would require UC researchers to pay to publish their own output.”27

UC’s proposal would actually reduce the burden on UC authors who wish to publish their work open access, by fully subsidizing authors without access to grant funds and asking those with sufficient grant funding to contribute toward only a portion of the open access fees....

The publisher claims that “when surveyed,” researchers had “extremely negative” reactions to the scenarios laid out in the 2016 research study referenced above.28

We are unaware of any survey that addresses the scenarios explored in the 2016 research study....

Elsevier claims that after Germany canceled its contract with the publisher, “83% of those surveyed complained of a ‘significant decline’ in their research productivity and that most wanted the contract renewed.”32

We are unaware of any such survey. When we inquired of German colleagues, they were also unaware of any published survey results correlating to these numbers...."