In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions from July 2018 onwards. We investigated the effect of these access restrictions on researchers' publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ~410,000 articles published by researchers at the affected DEAL institutions between 2012-2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations with Elsevier, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier's market share of articles from DEAL institutions, from a peak of 25.3% in 2015 to 20.6% in 2020, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occurring in 2019 (-1.1%) and 2020 (-1.6%) following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations made from articles published by authors at DEAL institutions to articles in Elsevier journals post-2018, although the decrease is smaller (-0.4% in 2019 and -0.6% in 2020) than changes in publishing volume. We conclude that Elsevier access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness of researchers at DEAL institutions to publish their research in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, with the implication that researchers use a variety of other methods (e.g. interlibrary loans, sharing between colleagues, or "shadow libraries") to access scientific literature.
翻译:2014年,德国一个研究组织联盟成立了Projekt DEAL,这是一个国家级项目,与大型科学出版商谈判许可协议。DEAL和Elsevier之间的谈判于2016年开始,在2018年没有成功协议的情况下破裂;在此期间,约200个德国研究机构取消了与Elsevier的许可协议,导致Elsevier自2018年7月起限制这些机构的期刊访问。我们调查了这些访问限制对研究人员出版的影响,并从生物学角度引用了行为,使用了2012-2020年受影响的DEAL机构研究人员发表的约410,000篇文章的数据集。我们进一步调查了与Elsevier、研究学科、协作模式和文章开放状态的取消时间方面的这些影响。我们发现Elsevier公司文章的市场份额从2015年的25.3%降至2020年的20.6%,从2019年(-1.1%)到2020年最大的市场贷款份额下降,但在20-20-20世纪20年(-20)年(我们-1.1%)受影响的研究者出版量限制后,Elsevier出版社的查阅量减少。我们发现El-18年(从20世纪60年)的版本文章减少。