After more than a year of negotiations, SUNY and Elsevier have reached a new agreement on access to 248 core titles from the ScienceDirect database.

As an added perk of the deal, SUNY faculty will receive a 10% discount on article processing charges (APC) for publishing open access work in Elsevier journals.

The three-year agreement with Elsevier, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific and technical scholarly journals, will provide a $7 million savings to the SUNY system.

Elsevier and the SUNY Libraries Consortium (SLC) – a group of SUNY library members that managed negotiations – approached the agreement recognizing the importance of Elsevier titles in research, teaching and clinical care.

However, the cost of licenses with Elsevier and other major scholarly publishers is rising at an unsustainable rate, says Evviva Weinraub, vice provost for university libraries.

“Universities and scholars around the world are recognizing the inequities built into the traditional publishing paradigm and are developing new ways to publish and access scholarly content,” says Weinraub. “This new agreement allows us to select those titles that have a value proposition that makes sense when we balance cost per use. As the SLC negotiated with Elsevier, we sought a contract that was affordable, sustainable and transparent, and that will help build a future where scholarly information is openly available.”

Core titles were identified through usage analytics and consultations with SUNY faculty and librarians. UB may supplement additional titles to meet campus needs.

Archival access to content published from 2010-19 will continue; however, UB faculty, staff and students should use the University Libraries’ Delivery+ service to obtain journal articles and book chapters that are no longer available through ScienceDirect.

Delivery+ is a free service for the campus community that provides the electronic delivery of individual journal articles.

Alternative options for accessing scholarly content are detailed in an online guide from the University Libraries.