Access to the ScienceDirect ‘big deal’ subscription package will end on April 1, 2020. Following a year plus of negotiations SUNY and Elsevier could not reach mutually acceptable terms on renewing our license to ScienceDirect. While Elsevier made some accommodations in recognition of SUNY’s requirements, there remained a vast difference in their proposed charges and cost expectations of the SUNY negotiating team. The journal-based research literature marketplace is dynamic, and publishers no longer have the same tight control over content that they’ve had in the past. The negotiating team’s perspective was that Elsevier did not go far enough in recognizing that the marketplace has changed, nor were they able to comprehend SUNY’s dissatisfaction at the disparity between the calculated cost per FTE between what SUNY was being charged and what our sister system, CUNY, was being charged – a difference in excess of 200%.
Rather than canceling access to all subscribed Elsevier ScienceDirect titles however, the negotiating team worked with librarian colleagues around the system to develop a list of approximately 250 core titles that we plan to subscribe to as a system. Our forecasting indicates that using our pre-existing access to ScienceDirect content for the period 2010-2019, along with interlibrary loan/Document Delivery and a growing body of open access content, most needs for teaching, research and scholarship will continue to be met. Please visit the Access Options page to see recommendations from the University Libraries. Individual campuses will be investigating ways to supplement titles on the core title list in order to better meet local needs, local resources permitting.
Many of these articles are available on other platforms. Use the UA Citation Finder or the quick guide below to check for full text copies.
