Elsevier Article Supply Service

The unsuccesful negotiations between the Elsevier publishing house and the DEAL Project which had been ongoing since 2016, were interrupted at the beginning of July 2018. Elsevier then disabled access to the journals that had still still been accessible since the beginning of 2018 despite the contractless state.

Kassel University Library offers its users a service for ordering Elsevier journal articles that are no longer accessible free of charge. Please use our online form for this purpose

Licence agreements for the electronic journal portfolio of major academic publishing houses (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer-Nature) are negotiated via the DEAL Project, which was initiated by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany. The key goals involve improving the supply of literature by providing permanent access for institutions to the entire portfolio, implementing an Open Access component and providing a suitable price system. Since no success has been achieved in the negotiations with Elsevier so far, numerous academic institutions have made use of their right to terminate the arrangement. The Konferenz Hessischer Universitätspräsidien has also decided to terminate the existing consortium agreement at the end of 2017.

The negotiations with Elsevier are deadlocked, the negotiating positions have been irreconcilable since the start of the negotiations in 2016. By the end of 2016, more than 60 scientific institutions had already terminated their contracts with Elsevier, and by the end of 2017, around 200 institutions had confirmed their desire for a DEAL licence by terminating their contracts.

Due to the still excessive demands of the publisher Elsevier, a temporary break in the negotiations was unavoidable at the beginning of July 2018. It was not possible to reach a fundamental agreement on the financial framework conditions and the scope of services of a future DEAL contract from mid-2019. Unfortunately, it has become clear that Elsevier is still not prepared to offer a scope of services under the principles of Open Access that is adequate for science and that can be financed in the long term.

The full texts of journals published by Elsevier within the network of the University of Kassel have no longer been available since 2018. 

The previous licence arrangements with Elsevier provide reliable access to the journal titles for 88 well-used journals from the start of the licence until the end of the licence period, i.e. until 31.12.2017. There are archive rights for the University of Kassel.

There is a national licence with Elsevier, which covers the largest and most important part of the journal portfolio (1,535 titles), in many cases from the first year of publication up to and including 2002. The national licence allows free access to these older volumes.

You can search for Open Access versions of articles. These can be found in search engines such as Google Scholar or the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE). Repositories such as arxiv.org or PubMed Central provide other possibilities. The Unpaywall browser plug-in is also recommended. It searches for a freely accessible version of an article and is already integrated in the RediLinkresolver, which is linked to results in our KARLA catalogue portal (Articles & more).

You can find specific information about Open Access in various subjects on the website of the open-access.network.