Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin Cancel Contract with International Publisher Elsevier
peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-11-07
Summary:
"Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin are canceling their contract with the international publisher Elsevier. They are demanding fair prices and free access to knowledge.
The universities issued this statement:
“The three major universities in Berlin and Charité are united in supporting the negotiation objectives of the alliance of German academic institutions regarding the DEAL project aiming to improve access to academic literature. Through nationwide licensing agreements with the major publishers Elsevier, Springer/Nature, and Wiley, their journals are to be converted to a new financing model that would provide financial relief for German academic institutions and at the same time permit their publications to be available on an open access basis. In the future, payment would no longer be made through subscriptions to journals, but rather by paying for the costs of publishing one’s own articles, which would then be made available free of charge to everyone.
More than half of the expenditures of German university libraries for journals currently go to these three major publishers...."