Successful Negotiation for SciFinder Scholar (Chemical Abstracts Service)

to increase UC access to SciFinder Scholar.

The negotiation success with ACS was unique: it resulted from a convergence of similar financial concerns expressed by both UC faculty who are ACS members and UC librarians who offer SciFinder Scholar as an important library resource.  Both groups questioned ACS’s business practices as a non-profit society publisher with a mission to serve academia.

In its negotiations, the CDL reiterated the issues that faculty raised publicly about ACS salaries and executive compensation in light of a pricing policy for libraries that essentially restricted access to the world’s chemistry literature.

The CDL also informed ACS of the new role of UCOP’s Office of Scholarly Communication and recent collaborative actions taken by faculty and librarians to deal with economic issues in scholarly publishing.

The ACS is a professional membership-based society with $1 billion in assets.  SciFinder Scholar pricing continues to be an issue for academic libraries across the country.

ACS’s 2003 Annual Report is publicly available at: http://center.acs.org/ar2003/ar03_financials.pdf