Bibsam Consortium is a consortium in which 85 higher education and research institutions in Sweden participate to negotiate license agreements for electronic information resources. The consortium is headed by the National Library of Sweden and negotiates as well as administrates license agreements for e-resource packages. The participating institutions sign a power of attorney which allows the National Librarian to sign contracts with the e-resource providers.

History and scope

The Bibsam Consortium was formed in 1996 in order to negotiate license agreements for electronic resources on behalf of Swedish Universities, research institutes and government agencies. The total turnover of the agreements in 2015 was € 33 million and € 35 million in 2017 with 73% of the turnover being generated by the ten largest universities in Sweden. There are six members in National Library of Sweden to negotiate and administrate the 100 license agreements for approximately 40 e-resource packages.

Negotiation with Elsevier

In 2018, the Bibsam Consortium terminated its agreement with

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

publishers in order to stop rising prices of publishing and to support open access publishing. The termination went into effect on 1 July 2018, as a result of which Swedish Universities and colleges had no access to any items published after this date in 2100 e-journals published by Elsevier. Sll articles published between 1 January 1995 and 30 June 2018 were still available. Astrid Söderbergh Widding, President of

Stockholm University Stockholm University ( sv, Stockholms universitet) is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, s ...

, Chairman of the Bibsam consortium steering committee and Head of the negotiation team, said: The requirements that Bibsam Consortium asks for were: * Immediate open access to all articles published by researchers affiliated to participating organizations in Elsevier journals. * Reading access for participating organisations to all articles in Elsevier’s journals. * A sustainable price model that enables a transition to open access.

References

{{reflist Open access (publishing) Consortia