bjoern.brembs.blog » So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?

"With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEALconsortium (600 institutions in total) with the publisher. In the run-up to these negotiations, all members of the consortium were urged to not renew their individual subscriptions with the publisher and most institutions apparently followed this call. As the first Elsevier offer was rejected by DEAL and further negotiations have been postponed until 2017, the participating institutions whose individual contract runs out this year will be without continued subscription access – as long as they don’t cave in and broker new individual contracts.

At first, this may seem like a massive problem for all students and faculty at these institutions. However, there are now so many alternative access strategies, that the well-informed scholar may not even notice much of a difference. Here are ten different options, in no particular order"