The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida (UF) and Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, have agreed to a new pilot program to support open access (OA) publishing at UF.
The agreement will support UF’s open access goals by providing the university’s researchers with incentives to publish OA articles. It also presents the opportunity to better understand researcher behavior and to learn from the resulting data—helping progress OA at UF and beyond. The pilot agreement is an amendment to the existing licensing agreement UF currently has with Elsevier. The new pilot agreement took effect July 1, 2020.
The Smathers Libraries were able to negotiate a discount on Article Processing Charges for articles where the UF author is the corresponding author because of the high volume of high quality articles that University of Florida faculty publish in Elsevier journals, and the growing percentage of those articles that are open access.
“I sought a transformative agreement that would benefit UF authors choosing to publish open access articles in Elsevier journals, and Elsevier listened! The agreement provides a discount for corresponding authors publishing open access articles in most Elsevier open access and hybrid journals. It is applied automatically, so UF authors do not have to do any extra work to benefit from it. We are looking forward to working with Elsevier to learn from this pilot project and hope it can be expanded to authors at additional universities in the future,” said Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida.
Gino Ussi, Executive Vice President, Elsevier said: “We are excited to further strengthen our relationship with the University of Florida and to support them towards achieving their open access ambitions. Over the years, UF has been a fantastic partner and this pilot is no exception; it presents an opportunity to work collaboratively with our customer towards a shared goal, something that we welcome at any point in time. We look forward to working closely with them as we test and learn from this pilot to enhance open access offerings in the future.”
The University of Florida (UF) is a major, comprehensive, land-grant, sea-grant, research university, ranked #7 among public universities by US News and World Report in 2020.
Elsevier is one of the world’s leading subscription and open access publishers, enabling researchers to stay up to date with the latest findings in science, technology and health from around the world.