Oregon State University has agreed to a new contract with Elsevier, providing immediate subscription access to 125 titles on the ScienceDirect platform. The total cost of this deal is $571,793 per year, a substantial reduction from our previous contract, which we paused at the end of December, 2022.  This contract will end in December 2025.  The full list of subscribed titles is available at the link below. OSU Libraries will continue to provide on-demand access to articles using alternative access methods for all other Elsevier content.

By reducing our subscription spend with Elsevier while investing more in on-demand access alternatives, we are trying to accomplish multiple goals:

1. Manage our budget in a way that is sustainable and flexible enough to allow us to adjust to a rapidly changing landscape.
2. Provide unmediated access for all OSU researchers -- not just those using high-use titles -- via on-demand services like Article Delivery and Interlibrary Loan.
3. Invest in community-driven scholarly communication infrastructure and support publishers and scholarly societies experimenting with sustainable business models.

OSU librarians try to achieve a better deal* every time we go to the negotiating table.  In this, we are guided by a set of negotiating principles we developed with OSU faculty.  These principles describe the terms and conditions that are important as we move towards sustainability in scholarly communications.  We do not expect to achieve everything articulated in these principles in every contract.  Every time we negotiate, we identify key terms and conditions that will help us get a better deal than we had before.  This agreement includes several of our preferred contract elements: better price transparency, the removal of Elsevier's confidentiality or non-disclosure clauses, protections in the case of changes to Elsevier's privacy policy and rights for researchers using computational research methods, including text and data mining. This was also the first contract OSU librarians have negotiated that included explicit language about the use of AI tools in research. We worked collaboratively with Elsevier's support team to articulate language clarifying acceptable uses, and establishing protections in the case of a rapidly changing legal and technological landscape. 

We want to thank the OSU community for the support we have received during the last year while our Elsevier contract was paused.  It means everything. 

*Thank you to NERL for their work modeling and sharing the better deal approach.

We are interested in getting your feedback to use in our decision-making process.  Please complete the survey to tell us how the resources we license impact your teaching, learning and/or research.  As a reminder, when we do not have active subscriptions to journals, OSU Libraries is committed to providing alternative access to that content.