For over a year, Texas State University has been an active participant in the Texas Library Coalition for United Action (Texas Coalition), a group of 43 academic institutions in Texas seeking to find sustainable solutions to the rising costs of subscriptions to academic journals and to improve relationships between academic institutions and publishers. We are pleased to announce that after lengthy negotiations, we have reached an agreement with the large publishing house Elsevier, that will allow us to continue with customized access to resources in the Science Direct database at a substantially improved cost.
As a result of the Texas Coalition’s efforts, each member institution will not only have shared access to a large swath of titles, they will also be able to negotiate a customized package deal with Elsevier that is financially sustainable and includes subscriptions to the journals their campus uses the most. Texas State piloted the process for negotiating these campus packages and is nearing completion of its new deal. Our package includes access to 800 journals through 2024.
In addition, University Libraries is taking steps to ensure that Texas State researchers will be able to get what they need:
- We’ve beefed up our staffing and processes for Interlibrary Loan (ILL). One of the advantages to being in the Texas Coalition is that member institutions, including all of the larger universities in the state, are committed to supporting one another via priority interlibrary loan access. So, Texas State researchers have access to journals from other campus packages as well. The average turnaround time for an ILL request for a journal article that is made during normal business hours is 2-3 hours.
- We’re piloting an Articles on Demand option for after-hours requests. The library will pay a fee for every request from Articles on Demand. Here is a video demonstration of how this service will work.
In addition to the access and cost, the Texas Coalition’s negotiations with Elsevier also included issues related to author’s rights. Two key agreements resulted from these efforts. First, Elsevier agreed to give discounts to authors from coalition member institutions when they choose to publish Open Access in Elsevier Journals. Second, the Coalition will partner with Elsevier to pilot a program that will explore the effects of reverting ownership of journal articles back to original authors after a period of time.
Texas State’s University Libraries will continue its active participation with the Texas Coalition and its commitment to improved access to scholarship, greater control over faculty content and more sustainable pricing models for journal subscriptions.
This article was contributed by University Libraries Marketing and Communications Coordinator Debbie Pitts.