Universities and Elsevier Science sign five-year collaborative agreement
Universities and Elsevier Science sign five-year collaborative agreement
Keywords University libraries, Science, Partnering, Electronic journals
UKB, the consortium of Dutch university libraries, has signed a five-year agreement with Elsevier Science. Behind the agreement is the vision that scientific information should be made permanently available electronically for all scientists and students. Mr Loek Hermans, the Dutch Minister of Education,has given his support to the initiative. This agreement, which provides for electronic access to the full-text of all Elsevier Science journals, reverses the trend whereby scientific information was becoming less readily available and accessible. Wider access serves the interests of both authors and readers.
In addition to the provision of Elsevier's scientific information, the purpose of the agreement is to work together to experiment with ways of providing scientific information through the use of information and communication technology. Universities are developing document servers on which scientists can make their working papers available. This may lead to changes in the distribution and business models that form the basis of scientific publishing. Experimenting with such changes also forms part of the agreement. It was agreed that the members of the UKB will, for a period of five years, have access to the full-text of all Elsevier Science primary publications through ScienceDirect, the biggest scientific database in the world.
Source: Press release
