NERL and Elsevier Continue With Agreement, Launch Pilot

Information Industry News

Chicago, IL | February 3, 2022

NERL, a consortium representing some of America’s leading research institutions, and Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, have established a new three-year agreement. The deal provides 13 of the NERL member institutions with ScienceDirect access and pilots retroactive open access (OA) for participating institutions’ authors. In 2021, a project team of NERL and Elsevier representatives established the agreement terms to ensure continued access to Elsevier's journals and support the NERL core values of transparency, sustainability, equity, reproducibility, and flexibility.

This mutually sustainable agreement includes numerous NERL Preferred Deal Elements. The retroactive OA pilot program is the first of its kind. Each year of the agreement will open five years of content by researchers based at NERL institutions — a total of 15 years constituting tens of thousands of articles authored by leading researchers. The agreement advances NERL’s values-based licensing agenda and Elsevier’s commitment to OA. The participating institutions — including Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester, the University of Miami and others — will all have content included as a part of the pilot.

Lindsay Cronk, project Co-chair and University of Rochester Assistant Dean of Scholarly Resources & Curation, said: “The future of scholarly communication depends on agreements that don’t reinforce the inertia of the past or create new inequities. We have succeeded in this agreement by arriving at an entirely new model that provides more access for all who seek knowledge.”

Greg Eow, President of the Center for Research Libraries, the administrative host of NERL, added: “We are proud that NERL continues to be a leader in the movement towards open access, and we look to build on this agreement to find even more robust ways to democratize access to scholarship going forward."

Elsevier works in partnership with customers to understand their objectives and collaborate with them to achieve these while preserving the quality, integrity, and sustainability of peer-review scholarly communications. The agreement supports NERL's goals by enabling researchers to stay up to date with the latest science, technology, and health findings worldwide via ScienceDirect, while opening ScienceDirect content authored by NERL researchers.

”We are delighted to support NERL’s world-class researchers to access and publish high-quality, trusted research,” says James Tonna, Elsevier’s Vice President for North America Academic and Government. “Working collaboratively with NERL, we hope to play a small part in helping their researchers advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society.”

About These Organizations

About NERL

A national leader in negotiated licensing, NERL maximizes effective and sustainable access to content for its member institutions. By building and supporting alliances between higher education and the information industry, NERL serves as an advocate for the collective power and influence of academic libraries and their parent institutions.

The NERL and Elsevier project was co-chaired by Jessica Morales of Notre Dame and Lindsay Cronk of the University of Rochester, with key contributors that included Ken Peterson formerly of Dartmouth University, Maridath Wilson of Boston University, Michael Fernandez of Yale University, Katie Brady of the University of Pennsylvania, and Terrie Wheeler of Cornell University.

About Elsevier

As a global leader in information and analytics, Elsevier helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. We do this by facilitating insights and critical decision-making for customers across the global research and health ecosystems.

In everything we publish, we uphold the highest standards of quality and integrity. We bring that same rigor to our information analytics solutions for researchers, health professionals, institutions and funders.

Elsevier employs 8,100 people worldwide. We have supported the work of our research and health partners for more than 140 years. Growing from our roots in publishing, we offer knowledge and valuable analytics that help our users make breakthroughs and drive societal progress. Digital solutions such as ScienceDirect(link is external), SciVal(link is external), ClinicalKey(link is external), and Sherpath(link is external) support strategic research management(link is external), R&D performance(link is external), clinical decision support(link is external), and health education(link is external). Researchers and healthcare professionals rely on our 2,500+ digitized journals, including The Lancet(link is external) and Cell(link is external); our 40,000 eBook titles; and our iconic reference works, such as Gray's Anatomy. With the Elsevier Foundation(link is external) and our external Inclusion & Diversity Advisory Board(link is external), we work in partnership with diverse stakeholders to advance inclusion and diversity(link is external) in science, research and healthcare in developing countries and around the world.

Elsevier is part of RELX(link is external), a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.