Antipodean researchers may lose access to content from the world’s biggest scholarly publisher, as the region flexes for a German-style boycott of Elsevier.

The Dutch journal house has resisted a collective push by Australian and New Zealand universities to corral the major scholarly publishers into a uniform agreement which would guarantee unfettered open access for Australasian academics.

The other three publishing houses – Taylor and Francis, Wiley and Springer Nature – have all signed on to the deal, described as a “monumental step forward” by the Council of Australasian University Librarians (Caul).

But negotiations with Elsevier have broken off after the two sides failed to reach agreement on subscription prices and the journals to be included.

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Hero Macdonald, chair of Caul’s content procurement committee, said “pricing transparency” was a major stumbling block. “Despite months of very intense engagement, Elsevier fundamentally weren’t able to provide us with clarity on how the pricing was formulated,” Macdonald said.

“We got to a point where we couldn’t in good conscience recommend the agreement because it didn’t represent fair value. When we benchmarked it against other publishers, it just didn’t come up to scratch.”

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Caul’s director of content procurement, Angus Cook, said Elsevier was seeking an “unjustified” premium for its content. “It doesn’t really matter which lens we look at Elsevier’s offers from. Whether it’s from cost of publishing, the amount of usage or the price according to the size of institution, their offers have always been vastly more expensive than the other publishers in comparison.”

Elsevier said it was committed to finding “sustainable solutions” for Australasian researchers. “We value our longstanding partnership with Caul and look forward to continuing to work with them in the future,” said Andrew Davis, Elsevier’s vice-president for communications.

“As [the] negotiations are currently on pause, we acknowledge Caul’s message to institutions to work directly with us to ensure continued reading and publishing access into next year.”

Caul said it had briefed its members that they were free to deal directly with the publishing giant, but had not encouraged them to do so. Members had expressed a “strong desire for a new consortium agreement, and we understand that many are choosing to wait for that to be achieved”, said CEO Jane Angel.

The impasse potentially leaves Australasia in the same situation as Germany, where universities lost access to Elsevier content in mid-2018 after refusing to renew their subscriptions over pricing disagreements. The stalemate lasted until September 2023 when the consortium representing the universities, Project Deal, achieved a more favourable “read-and-publish” deal.

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The University of California System also secured an open access deal with Elsevier in 2021 after boycotting the publisher for two years. Hungarian, Norwegian and Swedish universities also cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions over pricing and access disputes. Dozens of UK universities are currently considering letting their subscriptions with Elsevier and other major publishers lapse over disagreements about price.

While thousands of Australian academics joined a of Elsevier in 2012, refusing to edit, review or contribute content for the publisher, Caul said a widespread withdrawal from institutional subscriptions with the publisher would be “unprecedented” in the region. Contingency plans being discussed with members included interlibrary loans and perpetual read access rights.

However, the “in principle” agreements struck with the other three publishers marked a “major milestone” in the “shift toward fair, sustainable and transparent access to research”, it said.

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The trio along with Elsevier had signed open access deals with Caul in 2021 and 2022, but included confusing limits on the number of articles to be liberated from paywalls and the journals in which free articles could appear. Most – and in the case of Taylor and Francis, all – of these limits have been lifted in the three new agreements.

“It’s a significant improvement on what we’ve had before,” Cook said. “Authors…can feel confident that they can submit at any time during the year, and they will have a pathway to open access for their research.”

“Cost containment” had also been part of the agreements, he said, with annual increases in subscription costs kept to a minimum.

Researchers have long resented the multibillion-dollar profits scholarly publishers amass on the back of taxpayer-funded labour. Academics produce, review and edit journal content free of charge, and universities pay exorbitant sums – over A$300 million (£148 million) a year across Australia alone – in subscription charges to access the material.

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Caul’s latest round of negotiations, backed by representative groups Universities Australia and Universities New Zealand, was aimed at roping the major publishers into template agreements that could also be used in negotiations with smaller journal houses.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com