California’s Elsevier break strengthens other campuses’ hands | Times Higher Education (THE)

"The University of California’s decision to cut ties with Elsevier has led the publisher to soften its demands with other US campuses, according to an open access advocate.

The 10-campus California system refused to sign a new contract with Elsevier in January after the company failed to move far enough on librarians’ insistence that more content should be made available in free-to-read formats and that overall costs should be reduced....

Such sacrifice may be helping other universities, as several institutions now appear to be winning more conciliatory terms in their own talks with Elsevier.

“That’s actually what they’re telling us,” Jeff MacKie-Mason, the university librarian at University of California, Berkeley and the co-lead negotiator for the system’s talks with Elsevier, told Times Higher Education. “We’ve been told by several other consortia that our backing away and ending negotiations actually helped move theirs ahead more rapidly and more productively.” ..."