Elsevier Journals – The QMUL Figure | Edward F Hughes

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-05-19

Summary:

"A few weeks ago I reblogged Tim Gowers’ post about the cost of Elsevier journals. I noticed that my own institution (QMUL) had deflected his Freedom of Information request. Curious to learn more, I did some digging. It turns out that QMUL paid a total of £545,306.93 to Elsevier for the academic year 2013/14. Interestingly this is more than other universities that joined the Russell Group recently. However it’s still much cheaper than the bill Cambridge, UCL, Imperial or Edinburgh face. Unfortunately QMUL weren’t able to provide any further breakdown of the figures. Apparently this information isn’t available to the university, which seems like a very odd way of doing business. I think it likely that the vast majority of the cost is the subscription fee. I should point out that QMUL and Cambridge certainly have differentiated access to Elsevier journals. For example QMUL Library does not have access to Science Direct papers before the early 1990s. Cambridge University Library has universal access to this material. However with all the smoke and mirrors in this story, it’s impossible to turn this anecdotal evidence into an accurate account of Elsevier’s charging policy. There’s clearly a need for much greater transparency. Below is a transcript of the email I received from the QMUL FOI Department. I owe a debt of gratitude for their help ..."

Link:

http://edwardfhughes.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/elsevier-journals-the-qmul-figure/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.prices oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.elsevier oa.budgets oa.uk oa.librarians oa.libraries oa.colleges oa.universities oa.russell_group oa.qmul oa.comment oa.new ru.sparc oa.hei

Date tagged:

05/19/2014, 13:35

Date published:

05/19/2014, 02:00