Elsevier and SCELC establish partnership

Elsevier, a global information analytics and scientific publisher, last week announced a partnership with the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) with a focus on open access. The read and publish transformative agreement, effective from January 2024 for all 37 participating SCELC members, signifies advancement in open scholarship and community engagement while also providing critically important research content to students and researchers.

As a consortium dedicated to serving the varied needs of its libraries, SCELC supports collective action that enables small and midsize libraries to benefit from open publishing agreements that would not be available or manageable individually. Elsevier and SCELC say they worked together collaboratively to enhance how they both support the SCELC community by adding open access publishing to their ScienceDirect journal package agreement. Hundreds of corresponding authors across one-third of SCELC member institutions now have the option to publish open access articles in more than 2400 hybrid or fully open access Elsevier journals. The agreement is expected to cover open publication charges for more than 400 articles per year. For more details, please see the agreement page here.

Teri Oaks Gallaway, executive director of SCELC, said: “We are pleased to forge an agreement that enables our institutions to reallocate a significant portion of their Elsevier subscription dollars to facilitate open publication at no cost to authors and no additional cost to institutions. Our negotiations relied on cooperation and compromise on both sides and we are grateful for Elsevier’s creativity and flexibility throughout the process.”

James Tonna, VP research sales, Americas at Elsevier, added: “We are thrilled to collaborate with SCELC to advance in their goals and this transformative agreement marks a substantial stride toward a more inclusive research environment, nurturing innovation both for reading relevant content and publishing in high quality journals.”