France Preserves 'Big Deal' With Elsevier

By Lindsay McKenzie. The Couperin consortium, which represents 240 higher education and research institutes in France, has renewed its bundled journal subscription deal with Elsevier, the publisher.
The consortium’s decision is noteworthy because other large European consortia recently have gone in the other direction. Consortia in Germany, Sweden and Norway have all canceled their “big deals” with Elsevier. In the U.S., the University of California system recently walked away from the publisher after failing to reach an agreement.
The French consortium negotiated an Elsevier subscription discount of 13.3 percent over the next four years, according to The Sound of Science, a French science policy blog. More...