Elsevier and Japan’s university libraries agree on proposal for subscription framework with measures to support Open Access goals

30 Aug 2022 | Network Updates | Update from Elsevier / RELX
These updates are republished press releases and communications from members of the Science|Business Network

The Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) and Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, have successfully reached agreement on a new three-year proposal for subscription publishing with measures to support Japan’s open access (OA) goals, beginning January 1, 2021.

This is the first such agreement for Elsevier in Japan and the Asia Pacific region.

Based on this proposal, member universities affiliated with JUSTICE have the choice to choose from the subscription proposal and the proposal to promote Gold OA. The Gold OA proposal aims to reduce the financial burden of authors wishing to publish OA while continuing to provide access to ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature. This allows researchers from these universities access to 16 million publications from over 2,500 journals1 published by Elsevier and its society partners.

In addition, Elsevier and JUSTICE have worked together to provide options for more than 500 Japanese institutions and their researchers to support national goals around green OA and offer incentives to support open access publishing across Elsevier journals.

Mr. Seiji Hosokawa, Chair of the JUSTICE Steering Committee, said: “We are pleased that Elsevier has made an offer that’s aligned with the JUSTICE OA 2020 roadmap for us to reach an agreement. We see the agreement of the proposal as a small step for us, but one that we hope will lead to a major leap forward in promoting open access in Japan."

Gino Ussi, Executive Vice President, Elsevier, added: “We have worked closely with JUSTICE and its member universities to understand their research and open access goals, resulting in our new proposal for a framework that supports a broad set of needs. We are delighted to continue our longstanding partnership and continue to evolve our offerings in line with the priorities of the Japanese research community.”

As a global leader in research publishing, and information and analytics, Elsevier helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. We’ve built a wide-ranging portfolio of OA publishing options for authors and researchers across all subject areas. Nearly all our journals already offer immediate open access options and we are committed to finding a sustainable path so we can extend this to all our titles. Our agreement that supports JUSTICE’s open access goals is another example of the many tailored pilot or transformative agreements we’ve similarly established with other universities and consortia around the world, supporting open access. Each of these agreements are tailored to the specific needs of our partners, ranging from reading and publishing services, to broader areas such as reproducibility, transparency and collaboration in research. Our aim is to test and learn, to better understand how we can support all our customers’ differing needs.

This article was first published on 25 August by Elsevier/RELX.

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