Negotiations and Agreements

Ongoing negotiations

  • Cambridge University Press
  • Elsevier
  • Emerald

Signed agreements

List of all electronic resources acquired through FinELib is available here.

Agreement terms

What are the negotiations all about?

Who is negotiating?

The FinELib consortium negotiates with international publishers. The FinELib service unit is responsible for negotiations on behalf of the consortium.

In some cases, the service unit is supported by a negotiation group composed of representatives from member organisations. Consortium consists of Finnish universities, research institutes and public libraries.

What is being negotiated?

  • Terms and conditions of use
  • Terms of OA publishing

Negotiations concern the terms and conditions of use of scholarly journals. The subscribing organisations need to be able to use the materials in many ways – also for text and data mining and as course materials.

Additionally, terms of open access publishing are agreed, such as publishing articles openly without article processing charges.

Read more about the goals of the negotiations and the acquisition principles of the FinELib Consortium.

How do the negotiation results affect individual researchers?

  • Access to articles
  • OA benefits

The negotiation results affect what e-journal packages consortium members subscribe to; i.e. what e-journals researchers can access.

They also affect researchers’ ability to use open access publishing benefits such as publishing an article openly free of article processing charge.

If mutual understanding over prices and other contract terms can’t be reached, access to the licensed resource may be discontinued at the end of the agreement term. At the same time ends the right to use the open access publishing benefits provided in the agreement. The libraries and information services of the consortium members will always notify of such situations separately.

The consortium’s Alternative Access plan describes the options that researchers, teachers and students have if they do not have access to a certain resource for one reason or another.

How can researchers influence the negotiations?

Researchers are key customers of publishers. When in contact with publishers, researchers can express their views of the importance of reasonable prices and open access.

Information on the experiences and needs of researchers is valuable for FinELib, too, and it is utilized in negotiations.

Take advantage of open access benefits

During negotiations, open access benefits have been agreed upon regarding the journals of the following publishers.

More information about publisher- and organisation-specific open access benefits is also available from your own library.