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The current license agreements of many important scholarly e-journal collections will end 31 December 2016. The agreements determine on which terms the students, teachers and researchers in Finnish higher education and research organisations can access these scholarly journals and databases, and what this access costs to the organisations.

At the moment FinELib consortium, formed by the HE sector and research organisations, is negotiating with several international publishers (including e.g. Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis and ACS) to renew the license agreements.

These e-journal packages are very expensive. Finnish higher education and research organisations use tens of millions of euros during the agreement term to provide online access to these scholarly journals. FinELib’s goal in these negotiations is to achieve affordable prices, and also to improve the possibilities of Finnish researchers to publish open access in the scholarly journals included in the collections under negotiations.

Some of negotiations are progressing, but so far for example in Elsevier negotiations the publisher and FinELib have not reached a mutual understanding on either pricing or open access issues. If an agreement has not been reached before the end of this year, it is possible that there is no access to the e-journals published by Elsevier in January 2017.

Negotiations continue with all publishers. Libraries and information services will keep their users informed about the progress in negotiations.

More information on FinELib negotiations:

Statement from researchers to support the negotiations:

Further information: mari.aaltonen@aalto.fi

General conctact regarding e-materials: e-resources@aalto.fi