European Scientists Encountered Elsevier’s ” Toll Wall”

During this period, Philipp Kanske, a psychologist at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, was ” very angry” because he had to spend quite a lot of time contacting different libraries and even directly contacting the author by email to get the articles he needed. However, some articles are still impossible to obtain.

” It really makes me very angry.” He said.

All this comes from the deadlock in subscription negotiations between German scientific research institutions and publisher Elsevier.

Recently, Elsevier said that while German research institutions negotiated a new agreement with Elsevier, the company’s subscription volume decreased. However, some German libraries involved in the negotiations said that they saved a lot of money without subscribing, while still being able to provide articles needed by scholars.

One of the main obstacles to reaching an agreement is that institutions want to combine the subscription price of paid periodicals with the cost paid by libraries and researchers for open access to articles.

National library consortia in some countries have previously signed similar agreements with other major publishers, namely, reading and publishing contracts.

In mid – January, Germany’s DEAL project ended a two-year deadlock with academic publisher Willie. The DEAL project is trying to create a collective subscription agreement to replace the previous deal with publishers.

But the talks with Elsevier seem to be even more worrying.

The publisher’s previous talks with Germany, Hungary and Sweden broke down and negotiations with Norway and the University of California library system were postponed. At the same time, thousands of scientists in Germany, Hungary and Sweden had to cope with the inconvenience.

On the whole, however, Kanske supports the ongoing negotiations because he hopes that scientific journals will move towards full open access.

Therefore, he is prepared to bear the consequences of not subscribing to the agreement for a period of time. However, he hopes to reach an agreement to promote open science ” sooner” because the lack of access to research results from other laboratories is ” an unnecessary obstacle”.