Dear Toby and Liblicense-L readers,

that is correct, but the situation in Sweden is a bit different from Germany.

In Sweden, the previous contract has been renewed monthwise during the negotiations, for details cf.
http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/bibsamkonsortiet/qa-about-the-cancellation-of-the-agreement-with-elsevier-commencing-1-july/

In Germany, the German Rector's conference had already established an emergency plan to secure the supply of universities with needed articles on Dec 1, 2016. There were about 60 institutions whose (multi-year) contract (either direct, or through regional/other consortia) expired by the end of 2016; for a brief period, they lost access, but in mid February 2017 Elsevier re-instated access for those institutions unilaterally (cf. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/continued-elsevier-access-in-support-of-german-science, https://www.nature.com/news/german-scientists-regain-access-to-elsevier-journals-1.21482). During 2017 further institutions, science organisations and regional consortia announced that they would not renew their Elsevier contracts and by the end of 2017 the contracts of 200 Institutions (including the 60 mentioned above) had expired. Access for all those institutions continued (without payment) until July 11 when access was finally cut off after DEAL had declared the break-down of and suspension of the negotiations with the publisher (for details cf. https://www.projekt-deal.de/, https://www.projekt-deal.de/informationen/, https://www.projekt-deal.de/press-review/).

So Institutions in Germany have lost now access to content published since January 2017 or since January 2016, depending on the expiry date of their previous contracts.
Also, they have lost access to all previous published content behind paywalls that is not covered by previous agreements. This differs from institution to institution.

In Baden-Württemberg, for example, our regional consortium for 2015-2017 had access to over 2000 Elsevier Journals, but perpetual access rights 2015-2017 have been negotiated only for a subset (archival collection) of about 1100 titles.

There also remain access rights to our local core collections (locally subscribed titles) until 2014. Also, DFG has funded a national license for Elsevier Journal Backfiles on ScienceDirect 1907-2002 which however does not cover all existing backfile collections (cf. https://www.nationallizenzen.de/angebote/nlproduct.2006-03-10.4713615682). There is also a lot of Elsevier content that is not behind paywalls, e.g. for the Cell Press titles, access becomes free 12 months after publication, and all articles published open access (hybrid or gold).

Counter Usage Statistics for July and August 2018 are not yet available, so it is too early to give an account of the actual effect that the cutoff had on our usage.

However, in the first 14 days after Elsevier cut off access to our university, the announced free (and fast) interlibrary loan service for Elsevier Articles offered to members of the university (staff and students), cf. https://www.ub.uni-stuttgart.de/suchen-bestellen/e-ressourcen/deal.html, was taken up by just 11 persons for just 18 articles. For comparison, from Nov 2016 to Nov 2017 (12 months; Dec 2017 was an outlier) we had 535000 fulltext downloads, of which 86.000 were articles from the current publication year (2017, pre-published 2018, and articles in press), turnaways were 20.000.

Boingboing https://boingboing.net/2016/12/15/germany-wide-consortium-of-res.html wrote
"Even so, this kind of boycott was unimaginable until recently -- but the rise of guerrilla open access sites like Sci-Hub mean that researchers at participating institutions can continue to access Elsevier papers by other means." And someone on twitter summarized this as "60 german libraries announce #Elsevier boycott. Participants will access papers via pirate libs, like @Sci_Hub WoW!" 

Apparently, libraries in Germany enjoy a very revolutionary image ;-) Now, as highlighted above, we do offer free *and* legal alternatives to access Elsevier articles, but they seem less popular. Perhaps our users mistake Sci-hub as short for "Sciencedirect-Hub" and think it's an Elsevier sponsored service? There is however a range of other perfectly legal routes for students and academics to quickly get hold of needed articles, as outlined for example by Björn Brembs in a widely circulated post, "So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?" (http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/).

So we do not expect that faculty will start rioting, at least not against us (although I'd like to see a riot against Elsevier ;-). To the contrary, 16 years ago, at one of those cyclically recurring budget crises, our university library's faculty advisory board unanimously decided to back our proposal for a politically motivated "emergency decision" to cancel all of our Elsevier subscriptions (http://liblicense.crl.edu/ListArchives/0205/msg00127.html), an Elsevier Boycott that lasted 2 years, triggered a restructuring of our collection development in general (also for other publishers) and ultimately led to a new deal for Stuttgart University on a much lower and more sustainable pricing level. This time, it's again a political decision, widely backed by faculty, to support the demand of the German Rector's Conference for a sustainable publish and read model, which means fair payment for publication and unrestricted availability for readers afterwards. Also, many prominent scientists that were on the editorial and advisory boards of Elsevier have resigned in order to protest against the inacceptable demands of Elsevier and to support the DEAL negotiations, cf. https://idw-online.de/de/news682623

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

Am 09.08.2018 um 23:28 schrieb LIBLICENSE: