Faculty Senate members voice support for CU Library's Elsevier negotiations

In November 2003, after several months of negotiations, Cornell University Library (CUL) announced its decision not to renew its subscription with publisher Reed Elsevier for a bundled package of more than 900 journals. On Dec. 17, Cornell faculty present at a meeting of the University Faculty Senate gave unanimous support to a resolution that commends the library's effort to bring its serials subscription costs under control and specifically endorses the library's decision to switch to title-by-title purchasing of Elsevier journals.

The library made the decision to move from Elsevier's bundled plan, in which charges for electronic access to the journals are lower but no cancellation is allowed, to a plan that permits purchasing of Elsevier journals on a title-by-title basis. Library administrators have said that CUL could no longer justify paying an increasing price each year for Elsevier's bundle of serials when a significant number of titles in the package received hardly any use at Cornell. In 2003 CUL's Elsevier subscription included 930 online and print journals -- primarily science publications. Although these titles represent less than 2 percent of the total number of serials to which Cornell subscribes, the $1.7 million contract with Elsevier for the bundle amounted to more than 20 percent of the library's journal subscription expenditures. The Faculty Senate urged the library to work with the faculty to reduce that ratio in the near future to 15 percent.

Charles Walcott, dean of the university faculty, said, "It is essential that research universities take back control of the knowledge we create. We think this resolution is an important first step in that direction."

In its resolution the Faculty Senate recognized that current trends in serials pricing are clearly unsustainable. It went on to state that the increasing control by large commercial publishers over the publication and distribution of research "threatens to undermine core academic values promoting broad and rapid dissemination of new knowledge and unrestricted access to the results of scholarship and research." The senate encouraged the library to take an aggressive approach in negotiating new pricing models with commercial publishers and called upon the library and the faculty to investigate and support alternative methods to commercial publishing for the exchange of scholarly information.

The full text of the Dec. 17 Faculty Senate resolution can be found at http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/resolution.html. Additional information about Cornell's negotiations with Elsevier is available at the library's Issues in Scholarly Communication Web site: http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/elsevier.html.