UK universities have reached a three-year agreement with Elsevier providing both unlimited open access publishing and access to paywalled journal articles for a significant reduction on current institutional spend.
Jisc's managing director of higher education and research, Liam Earney, said:
"We have achieved an outcome that meets the requirements of UK institutions. This is thanks to the hard work of the sector and the negotiations team and the strong partnership approach adopted throughout the process.
"This agreement meets all the core requirements of the sector and the contract has now been signed.
"This is the world's largest Open Access (OA) agreement with Elsevier and is unique both in the level of savings and the access it delivers and is a major step in the transition towards full, equitable and affordable transition to open scholarship.
"The agreement provides unlimited and immediate open access to Elsevier ScienceDirect's publications, as well as significant savings on total sector spend. This means that, alongside the sector's other open access agreements, 80% of UK research can be made open access at no cost to authors.
"However, there is still much more work to be done and Jisc will continue to work with the sector through the negotiation of transitional and OA agreements which enable UK research output to be published OA in accordance with UK funder policies."