CDL has completed a favorable negotiation with Elsevier to renew the Science Direct journals for 2014-2018. The agreement continues UC’s strong record of excellent long-term cost control for this important package. Science Direct is the largest journals package for co-investment by the UC libraries with over 1200 titles. A number of high value Freedom Collection (unsubscribed) titles will be moved into subscribed status with perpetual rights. Selectors from nine campuses worked together to choose the list of titles to swap.
As part of the final agreement, CDL has purchased Elsevier’s 2014 ebook frontlist (858 titles, excluding health sciences) and one year of trial access to the Scopus database on behalf of all campuses.
Scopus is an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, including some 50 million records, 21,000 titles and 5,000 publishers, and includes tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
A dedicated task force reporting to the Systemwide Collections Licensing Subgroup (CLS) has been working to evaluate Scopus and provide input to CLS on the merits of this resource. Each campus library will make its own decision on how to evaluate Scopus locally and will soon have a local contact person in place to arrange for training and answer questions. The campuses will decide by next fall whether to make a formal purchase of this resource.