Elsevier Announces a Transformative Agreement with Tulane

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From Publishing Perspectives:

The Amsterdam-based Elsevier and Tulane University in New Orleans on Tuesday (February 7) announced a new transformative agreement for reading and publishing.

As our trade-based Publishing Perspectives readers will remember, a “transformative agreement” is a tool used in large-scale contracts to evolve operating and economic models toward open-access frameworks. There now are transformative agreements being announced by major academic publishers such as Elsevier on an almost weekly basis as the transition to open access snowballs.

Transformative agreements are made between publishers and institutions such as libraries and universities to “transform” how content is paid for, specifically transitioning from subscription-based business models to open access. Scholarly Kitchen has a thorough explanation of transformative agreements here.

Elsevier’s transformative agreement with Tulane “will continue to provide access to the same extensive portfolio of ScienceDirect journals,” the publisher says, “that enhance the learning and research experience for the Tulane community while now also supporting all researchers in publishing their research Open Access at no extra cost to the author.”

Tulane students and faculty members will have access to Elsevier’s library of journals and ebooks on its ScienceDirect branded platform.

The agreement also includes support for open-access publishing for Tulane’s research writers.

In a prepared statement, Andy Corrigan, Tulane’s interim dean of libraries, is quoted, saying that the arrangement “expands the scope of our agreement to now include open-access publishing options for our scientific and medical communities.

“This new arrangement accomplishes three important goals.

“It supports public access to grant-funded research, addresses cost sustainability within our library budget, and it increases the university’s overall return on investment in supporting the acquisition of high-quality library resources such as important ScienceDirect journals that are relied upon by our students, faculty and researchers.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

Color PG extremely skeptical on this topic.

Elsevier has been the paradigm for making money publishing the work of academics and others who inhabit a publish-or-perish work environment. Under the paradigm, Elsevier has exclusive publishing rights forever and the author of the work gets an academic/scientific publication to put on her/his resume’.

6 thoughts on “Elsevier Announces a Transformative Agreement with Tulane”

  1. Skeptical is far too generous for me.

    …Elsevier has exclusive publishing rights forever and the author of the work gets an academic/scientific publication to put on her/his resumé.

    Not to mention that Elsevier’s model for many of its journals is vanity publishing: The authors pay “page fees” (recently renamed as “Article Publishing Charges“; scroll down and amaze yourself with the downloadable spreadsheet) to the journal to supposedly compensate the journal for the expenses of… well, actually, every time I’ve asked that question — including two depositions during which the respondents were under oath — I’ve gotten a different and incompatible answer. So I think the answer is “compensate the journal’s bottom line for its very existence.”

    And further not to mention submission fees.

  2. What is Elsevier getting for its ‘generosity’?

    Were they about to lose something – and has that loss now at least been stemmed?

    Were they about to get dumped, and this keeps them still in part of the game?

    Were the schools finally responding to their students’ disgust at the collusion?

    These things always have the knots and tangles on the back of the embroidery. What is missing?

  3. These days, authors who fall for such audacious rights-grabs in any field deserve what they get.

    In the meantime, somebody at Publishing Perspectives needs a good editor. For a moment, I couldn’t get past this sentence: “There now are transformative agreements being announced by major academic publishers such as Elsevier on an almost weekly basis as the transition to open access snowballs.” I frowned. What are open-access snowballs and what do they have to do with anything? (grin)

    • “Open-access snowballs” are what one gets by going out in the cold (usually academic conferences) and packing together sufficient quantities of special snowflakes. I say this as an academically-attuned lawyer; being academically attuned means I pay attention to what’s going on around me…

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