Q: Why was this decision made?
The prices associated with Big Deals are too high and have grown too fast, relative to the value of the journal titles they contain. High prices reflect monopoly power and unyielding bargaining practices. The academic journal ecosystem is dominated by five highly profitable commercial firms: Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. The portion of this content that scholars cite has gone steadily down over the years, while the portion of titles in the database that do not get used continues to go up, reflecting increasing bloat in the overall package.
Big Deals consume a portion of library budgets that exceeds their value to our researchers; crowding out other investments and threatening to undermine our support for broad and diverse research collections. At the University of Lynchburg for 2020 - 2021, Elsevier consumed around 15% of the library’s E-resources budget, while only serving a small portion of our academic programs.
Q: Does cancelling ScienceDirect mean that I no longer have access to any Elsevier content?
A: No. We have some a-la-carte journal title subscriptions that will persist. Additionally, some Elsevier titles from ScienceDirect also live in other products in the library’s collection of databases. The transition to ProQuest Central will give us access to 82 new Elsevier titles which we did not have through our subscriptions previously. Finally, Gale Academic OneFile contains Elsevier abstracts from 1996 to present. This means that you will still be able to find Elsevier articles. If found articles are not available in full text through one of the library’s continuing database subscriptions, they can be requested via Interlibrary Loan.
Q: What if there is a specific Elsevier journal my program needs that isn’t available elsewhere?
A: Please talk to your liaison librarian about the possibility of an a-la-carte journal subscription - you can also start this conversation by electronically completing our feedback form.