1st Mar 2019 15:51
LONDON (Alliance News) - Shares in RELX PLC fell to the bottom of the FTSE 100 on Friday after the University of California said it would cancel its multi-million pound contract to subscribe to journals published by the Elsevier.
RELX shares were down 7.1% at 1,606.50 pence on Friday.
University of California on Thursday said RELX's business model blocked free access to academic knowledge. Elsevier is the publishing arm of the Anglo-Dutch information and analytics firm and publishes almost half-a-million academic articles every year and UC said it was satisfied to keep paying its the substantial subscription fee so it could continue to access them.
UC said that after months of negotiations, talks broke down as Elsevier refused to cut a package deal which would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide.
"The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the US - not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution - can afford to subscribe to them all," Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, librarian and economics professor at University of California, said.
"Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society."
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