The Royal Danish Library and Elsevier agree to four-year contract for reading and open access publishing

Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics and the Royal Danish Library have agreed on a four-year contract to support continued reading and open access (OA) publishing for Danish researchers. This is the first time the Danish consortium led by the Royal Danish Library has signed an open access transformative agreement with any publisher and this agreement complements Elsevier’s transformative agreements across many European countries.

Elsevier will support the Danish researcher community’s ambitions by enabling Danish researchers to publish open access across a broad range of Elsevier journals, therefore making their latest research freely available at the point of publication. Elsevier is determined to find the right solutions for our customers and meet customers’ diverse OA requirements across different academic institutions worldwide. We do so while critically ensuring published research remains trusted and of a high quality. This agreement will support over 30 Danish institutions, including the eight leading universities, helping them share their latest research globally. The new agreement program will take effect from January 2021 through to the end of 2024.

We continue to test and learn from the OA agreements that are already being put into practice with institutions and governments worldwide. This enables us to work with our partners to continually improve our open access offerings, such as building new workflows and submission processes to provide greater visibility, transparency and a best-in-class publishing experience for authors.

Kira Stine Hansen, Deputy Director, Royal Danish Library and Head of Copenhagen University Library said: “On behalf of Danish universities and research performing organizations we are pleased with this read and publish deal continuing the support of the national strategy of free, open and equal access to scientific results for the benefit of society. Cost neutral Immediate Open Access has been and will continue to be a very important parameter in the coming negotiations with global academic publishers.”

Gino Ussi, Executive Vice President, Elsevier said: “It’s a real honour to be the first publisher to agree on a transformative contract to support Danish researchers. The Elsevier team is looking forward to supporting Denmark’s world-class researchers to access and publish credible, high quality, trusted research. The importance of helping researchers advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society has never been more critical, and we are committed to playing our part in making Danish research output available to all.”

The agreement is the latest in a series of transformative agreements Elsevier has reached with customers across Europe, the US, Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

In 2020 Elsevier published nearly 100,000 gold or pay-to-publish OA articles compared to 50,000 in 2019, making us one of the largest open access publishers in the world. Nearly all of Elsevier’s 2,600 journals now enable OA publishing, including 500 fully OA journals.

Elsevier enables researchers to stay up to date with the latest science, technology, and health findings from around the world via ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature. Overall, ScienceDirect gives researchers access to 16 million articles from over 2,600 journals published by Elsevier and our society partners.

Playing our part in widening free access beyond OA
Where the need is greatest and we can make the biggest difference in a sustainable way, Elsevier makes research completely free to access. In addition, all our reading and discovery platforms have extensive free-to-read options. Some examples of this commitment include:

• Authors who publish with our journals are immediately able to share their peer reviewed, accepted manuscript on non-commercial personal homepages or blogs, within their institution, and with collaborators.
• We offer free access to relevant research for health emergencies, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Patients and caregivers are provided with papers related to medicine and healthcare upon request to help them better understand the latest research on their conditions.
• We ensure everyone can access a collection of the work from each year’s Nobel Prize winners.
• We have also completely opened the archives for 140 journals, including Cell Press research journals after 12 months.
• Through Research4Life, institutions in 120 low- and middle-income countries receive affordable access to nearly 100,400 peer reviewed resources. As founding member, Elsevier provides over a quarter of that content, as well as access to the abstract and citation database Scopus and trainings for librarians.
• We automatically apply waivers or discounts to articles in fully gold OA journals for which all authors are based in a low-income country.

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, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath support strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support, and health education. Researchers and healthcare professionals rely on our 2,500+ digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell; our 40,000 eBook titles; and our iconic reference works, such as Gray’s Anatomy. With the Elsevier Foundation and our external Inclusion & Diversity Advisory Board, we work in partnership with diverse stakeholders to advance inclusion and diversity in science, research and healthcare in developing countries and around the world.

Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. www.elsevier.com.