Negotiations with Taylor & Francis hit a wall

28.1.2019

Negotiations between the FinELib consortium and Taylor & Francis ended with no positive results. The end of the negotiations means that access to Taylor & Francis journals will end on 1 February 2019.

FinELib’s goal was to provide researchers with access to journals published by Taylor & Francis and an opportunity to publish their articles open access, available to everyone. The publisher and the consortium have highly differing views of reasonable costs.

“This is an unfortunate situation. We are ready to continue the negotiations, provided that the publisher sets more reasonable demands”, says Arja Tuuliniemi who is in charge of FinELib services. “Universities and research institutions in Finland are highly committed to promoting open access publishing. However, the change towards open access cannot mean that scientific publications become more expensive.”

“It is very important for the scientific community that open access publishing increases. However, research organisations are not money-making tools for large publishers, and we cannot give in to the continuous demands for more money. This is a difficult situation, but a necessary one”, says Mikko Tolonen, an assistant professor in digital humanities at the University of Helsinki and a member of FinELib’s strategy group for journal negotiations.

The libraries and information services of the consortium’s member organisations help researchers, teachers and students to find alternative ways to access articles. Different ways to search for articles can also be found from FinELib’s Alternative Access site.