Halfway Check-In with our Elsevier Open Access Publishing Agreement

We are now halfway through the 2023-2025 pilot of our Read & Publish agreement with Elsevier. We’re excited to see so many KUMC authors choosing to publish their articles open access, ensuring their research is freely accessible to a global audience and increasing equity in medical research. In our agreement with Elsevier, we maintain the same access to read journal content; the deal also offers significant cost savings to publish with Elsevier through waivers and discounts on article processing charges (APCs). In this post we’ll cover how you can publish open under our agreement with Elsevier, review statistics for the last 18 months, and take a brief look at what the future may hold with Read & Publish deals.

How the Deal Works

Requirements:

1. You must be a KUMC corresponding author;
2. Your manuscript must be accepted for publication by December 31st, 2025;
3. Your article must be published in an eligible journal. We have a handy searchable/browsable list available. When searching pay attention to the OA Type:
   1. Hybrid = full APC waiver

   2. Open Access = 10% discount on APC

      

Key Elements of the Post-Acceptance Author Journey:

1. Choose University of Kansas Medical Center as your organization. (Why are there three Med Center options? No idea! Pick one and you’re good to go.)  

   

2. Select your publishing option (hybrid journals):
   1. Hybrid Open Access: APCs are completely waived

   2. Subscription: opt out of publishing open and keep your article behind a paywall

      Here’s where things can get dicey and why librarians love consistent language

      1. Gold Open Access will be preselected. Traditionally “Gold” means a fully open access journal; however, Elsevier uses the term more broadly to mean any open access publishing, including articles in hybrid journals. (This is confusing…yes, we’ve told Elsevier.) 
      2. You will see an exorbitant APC. Don’t panic! 
         1. If you see the total “To pay” is $0.00 then your fee will be waived in this hybrid journal.
         2. Alternately, for a Fully Open Access journal, you will see a 10% discount applied.

      3. We completely respect author choice. If you legitimately want your article published behind a paywall, choose Subscription. But if you want to publish open access, leave that Gold Open Access button selected. 

         

3. Choose your Creative Commons license. Not sure which to choose? Ask us (rsm@kumc.edu). We’re happy to help!

   

4. Your dedicated librarian will receive your request for open access funding, verify your eligibility, and approve your request, generally within 2 business days. 

Recap of the Last 18 Months

Not surprisingly, KUMC saw a significant rise in hybrid open access publishing under our pilot agreement starting in 2023, from 9 articles in 2022 to 49 articles in 2023, and 34 in the first half of 2024. As a result, articles published behind a paywall have dramatically declined, from 104 in 2022, to 41 in 2023, and only 8 in 2024. We also saw a decline in publishing in fully open access journals, dropping from 40 to 13 between 2022 and 2023. However, it appears we may see an increase in 2024, with 13 articles already published in the last 6 months. We attribute this decline to the availability of hybrid fee waivers. While we want to encourage publishing in fully OA journals, we understand that a fee waiver is more affordable than a 10% discount. 

We were surprised to see that almost half of our authors opted out of hybrid OA publishing in 2023. We learned about the option to retrospectively flip articles to open access in November 2023, with a January 31st deadline to submit requests. We sent a flurry of emails to authors offering this option. Of the 41 paywalled articles in 2023, eight were retrospectively flipped to open. Many authors commented that they didn’t know about our agreement or thought it seemed too good to be true. We’re seeing a decline of Paywalled articles in 2024, presumably as awareness of our agreement grows. We also now proactively contact authors who publish behind a paywall every month, offering the option to flip their article to OA. Of the eight articles paywalled in 2024, four transitioned to OA. 

Our deal with Elsevier is a joint agreement with KU's Main campus in Lawrence. How do we compare to Main's open access publication output? Although Med publishes a little more (70 articles from Med vs 60 from Main in 2023), the open access publication output on both campuses is pretty comparable. The chart below accounts for articles that were retrospectively flipped to OA. 

Looking Ahead

We’ve attempted to negotiate similar Read & Publish agreements with Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley; however, most publishers would require us to get back into the “Big Deal”, subscribing to a larger number of titles at a significantly higher cost. It would also place greater restrictions on the number of open access waivers offered under the deal, so not all of our authors would benefit. We do have publishing caps in our Elsevier agreement, but at 265 APC waivers per year we anticipate this will be more than enough to cover all of KU's OA publication output. For this reason, our deal with Elsevier is unique and surprisingly good. 

Despite the affordability and benefits Elsevier offers in this agreement, in the future we’d like to see full fee waivers for both hybrid and fully open access journals, along with coverage for currently ineligible journals such as Cell Press and The Lancet. Are we living in a fairy tale of unicorns, puppy dogs, and rainbows? Maybe. But in June 2024 the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries signed such an all-inclusive deal. So maybe a utopian open access future is on the horizon. Until then, let’s see how the next 18 months go. 

In the meantime, check out our Open Access libguide for all our current funding opportunities.