Elsevier’s response to The Norwegian Directorate for ICT and Shared Services in Higher Education and
Research (UNIT)’s decision to not renew their agreement with Elsevier
Elsevier is a service provider, offering information and analytics that help institutions and professionals
progress science, advance healthcare and improve performance. We provide those services to
customers at above-average market quality and below-average market pricing. Our approach is to
engage with our customers to understand their objectives and work with them to help achieve those
objectives in a way they ultimately find economically attractive, while preserving the quality, integrity
and sustainability of the peer review publishing system.
While Elsevier is working hard to accommodate the desire of some for an author-pays-to-publish (open
access) world, the reality is that current author choices mean that 85 percent of journal articles globally
are published under the reader-pays (subscription) model, where authors publish for free. It’s possible
to come up with a negotiated agreement at reasonable costs, and Elsevier offered Norway multiple lowcost options for a rapid transition to gold open access publishing, but open access is a service that has to
be funded in some form. Norway is essentially asking to receive two services for the price of one.
Elsevier remains open to restarting constructive talks to help and support Norway’s transition to open
access. UNIT’s decision to discontinue access to Elsevier’s latest high-quality content is unfortunate for
everyone, particularly researchers, especially as Elsevier cannot continue service indefinitely without
being paid. We will continue to seek an agreement with UNIT directly and by communicating with the
research community.