Harvard sez "Elsevier's being jerks." From 2004.

We would like to provide a statement following recent feedback from the library and academic community in relation to our new policy.

13 February 2018 Dear Mr Chesher and colleagues We write as representatives of the academic library community within the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Chief negotiator Koen Becking is considering all available options in the next round of negotiations.

John Unsworth's Home Page

Nature - Scientists in Germany can still read journals even though institutions there have not renewed their subscriptions.

Excellent, historically-aware explainer. DOES NOT explain the Big Deal, however.

Nature - Negotiations to reduce journal prices and promote open access are progressing slowly.

Commercial scholarly publishers promote and sell bundles of journals—known as big deals—that provide access to entire collections rather than individual journals. Following this new model, size of serial collections in academic libraries increased almost fivefold from 1986 to 2011. Using data on library subscriptions and references made for a sample of North American universities, this study provides evidence that, while big deal bundles do decrease the mean price per subscribed journal, academic libraries receive less value for their investment. We find that university researchers cite only a fraction of journals purchased by their libraries, that this fraction is decreasing, and that the cost per cited journal has increased. These findings reveal how academic publishers use product differentiation and price strategies to increase sales and profits in the digital era, often at the expense of university and scientific stakeholders.

FOIA request to Elsevier from UNAM.

Good historical summary.

Libraries entrust negotiating authority to consortia upon the assumption that consortia can exercise greater “buying power” than individual institutions when dealing with vendors, because of greater scale. The prevailing mythology is that consortial deals simply must be better deals than libraries could secure on their own. In this presentation, the author questions the presumption that scale necessarily leads to better deals for libraries. Rather, library agency, as exercised in direct negotiations, can be more effective than scale for the purpose of securing the best possible deals. In fact, scale can lead to detrimental effects, to the extent individual institutions are forced to take bad deals negotiated by consortia to meet multiple, competing priorities. Not only can individual institutions secure better terms by dealing directly with vendors, but they can make better selection decisions, more appropriate to local campus conditions and priorities to support student success.

The long read: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell

In a May 2 statement, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) announced that Louisiana State University (LSU) filed a lawsuit against academic publishing company Elsevier for breach of contract on February 27. According to the complaint, Elsevier cut off the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine’s (SVM) access to content that was legally licensed by LSU Libraries. For many reasons, especially Elsevier’s often contentious relationship with libraries over the decades, this will be one of the more interesting cases to watch unfold.

Université de Montréal systematically says no.