University of California statement on California State University’s Read and Publish-Plus agreement with Elsevier

By admin / March 9, 2020

Ivy Anderson and Jeff MacKie-Mason, who co-chair the team overseeing UC’s publisher negotiations strategy, issued the below statement today, following California State University’s announcement that CSU has reached a transformative agreement with Elsevier that integrates open access publishing of CSU research with the university’s subscription to Elsevier journal content.

We congratulate our colleagues at California State University on their success in reaching this agreement with Elsevier. It is exciting to see California continuing to lead in the movement to advance open access to scholarly research.

The main points of the agreement, as announced by CSU, are consonant with UC’s goals: an integrated agreement that includes open access publishing for all of the university’s research in Elsevier journals, with authors able to retain copyright and full re-use rights by publishing under a Creative Commons license, within an agreement that is essentially expenditure-neutral. We look forward to the opportunity to re-engage in conversations with Elsevier to achieve a cost-effective agreement on similar terms.

We particularly welcome and share in the partnership vision set forth by our CSU colleagues. As sibling universities operating under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, UC and CSU share a commitment to expanding public access to the publicly funded research conducted at our universities. We look forward to identifying opportunities to collaborate with CSU and other California institutions in making that vision a reality, through complementary or joint publisher agreements that expand access to knowledge for the benefit of the people of California and the world.

Ivy Anderson is the associate executive director of UC’s California Digital Library. Jeff MacKie-Mason is the university librarian and chief digital scholarship officer at UC Berkeley, where he is also a professor in the School of Information and a professor of economics. MacKie-Mason and Anderson co-chair UC’s Publisher Negotiation Task Force, representing the faculty senate’s University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC), the Council of University Librarians (CoUL), and the California Digital Library (CDL).