 As Jeremy said that the timing is really good because what I plan to talk to you about was what happened when we did decide to let our contract lapse with Elsevier two years ago. And fortunately I can kind of complete the story today at least to this point. So really it shows you that not only was the strategy a viable one but that it has led to what we hope is a very good outcome. So let me just start briefly by setting some context for the University of California for those who aren't intimately familiar with it so you understand our approach and can think about how that maps to your own institution and are all UK. So the University of California is the largest public research university in the United States California is the largest state in the country and so not surprisingly it's flagship university is also very very large so we have 10 campuses and five medical centers that's important in this story. A very large number of students, faculty and staff. So the community is as close to 500,000 people all together. Our research expenditures are in the order of five, probably more now billion dollars a year this is research grant funding that the university receives and I'm sure you all know that in the US research is funded through federal agencies that give grants to individual researchers, and then they spend that money on their research so very very little is centrally funded through universities directly. UC is also a publishing powerhouse our faculty and other researchers publish around 50,000 articles a year 50% as corresponding author, and that constitutes around 10% of all research publications coming out of the US so this we are a very large customer for these scholarly publishers. We also because of the size of the University of California we have a very well defined shared governance model with faculty so there is an academic senate or faculty senate whatever you call it at your institution. Every campus has one of those so my campus Davis is one of them. And then the whole university has one we call that a system wide committee. So and that's important because they're very active and all the faculty at the University of California, more or less deferred to their decisions on policy issues. So we know who to work with on faculty issues and get to get their feedback and their support. We worked at other institutions before the University of California and it wasn't as clear which faculty were really the influencers and decision makers. So that's been a benefit to us in this whole process. In particular there's a committee called the University of California committee on library and scholarly communications which is the faculty library committee. We have worked with them for decades on these policy and other issues relating to faculty. There is also a Council of University librarians that I sit on and that's the 10 University librarians and the executive director of the California Digital Library. And we serve as the system wide committee that strategizes for the UC libraries. We've done that for many, many years. Very effectively we call that the power of 10, because if any one campus like mine. Tried to go it alone, you know we would get so far but as a system with 10 institutions, many of which are in the top 10 institutions in the country, over half of the UC campuses are in the top 10 public institutions in the US. Together, we form quite a powerhouse when it comes to negotiating and so on. So now I'm going to tell you the Elsevier saga, because it's illustrative of, well, what you're about to go through. And it kind of paints what was interesting about our approach as a good example. So I'll just give you a very quick review of the timeline of all this. I think for many of you like me covert has kind of zapped my sense of timescale. It's as if 2020 never happened. So, so I have to remind myself all the time, what was going on throughout this process. And as early as 2013, our faculty Senate decided to create a policy that all faculty publications would be made publicly available with open access, using the green model of self deposit in our institutional repository which is called the scholarship. And even before 2013 faculty were very active in pressuring publishers including Elsevier and spring nature into working with the University of California to improve our deal so that there's a long history of activism there, and positive positioning on open access. In 2015 16, I actually led a project a research project called pay it forward with ID Anderson from the California Digital Library. And we were looking at financial models for open access with the emerging gold model of article publishing charges that authors pay. We wanted to look and see whether that model would work well in the United States and other North American and Canada, particularly as a as a financial model for sustainable at scale open access publishing and and our conclusion was yes but with certain criteria which I'll get into in a minute. So, so we decided that that was the experiment we wanted to try. And we got the faculty Senate engaged with planning with us. That led into the negotiations that began, as Jeremy said back in 2018 when our contract was coming up for renewal. The contract expired in December. We didn't renew it but we continued to negotiate for a few more months. And then, right around February March we decided this is not going anywhere. We're done with that. And it wasn't until July that they actually shut off our access. I, for various reasons which you'd have to ask Elsevier about. And then a lot of time went by. What happened, you know, there was a lot of discussion about it but the world didn't end, the sky didn't fall. Researchers worked around this situation. We went on about our business signed quite a few other open access deals. And then back in June, Elsevier reappeared and we started negotiating again and that's what got us here today so that's kind of the arc of this whole thing. And I'm going to be talking specifically about what happened from December on to get us to this point. So the framework that we developed had with the faculty had a few high level goals when was we had to get our expenses down we were paying quite a lot of money for Elsevier subscriptions not as much as some institutions but still quite a lot of money. And we wanted to make open access the default option for faculty publications going forward. So we required a transformative what we call a transformative agreement that that brought those two together into a single contract and this is not new to any of you. So what was a little different about our flavor of that is that we wanted the combo contract where our subscription spend would go down as we spent more money from the library's budget on open access publishing fees and we wanted to end the so we called double dipping, because one of the trends we saw is that the library's subscription fees were high and increasing. Well the authors at our institutions were spontaneously paying these article processing charges and it crossed the million dollar mark back in 2018 so that is completely double dipping you know they're paying to publish open access and we're paying to subscribe to the same article. That was one of the trigger points for this. And we had this interesting multiplayer model, you know, if you're not familiar with the US healthcare system. This may sound very strange but in this model. The library pays some of the fee, and the author pays the rest of the fee. The idea is that it will make authors more aware of the cost of publishing, and a little bit more savvy when it comes to deciding which journal they want to publish in, they'll be at least conscious of the cost involved because they're paying a share of it. Traditionally from a research grant which allows that this multiplayer model according to our projections would be financially sustainable at scale over the long haul, if it works out the way we hope. So, we got together with the faculty and spent, you know, at least a year working on this framework and working on other aspects of our strategy. For example, we don't just want to work with large commercial publishers that have these hybrid journals that charge a fee to publish we also want to work with fully gold journals like the public library of science and with societies that are trying to to self publish their journals in new ways and so on so it's it's not exclusive to things like Elsevier, or to companies like Elsevier. And so the faculty library committee came up with a declaration with 18 principles that they wanted to adhere to the University of California is Provost who's the senior academic officer for the whole UC system issued a call to action. And that was when we announced that we were going to renegotiate our contract with Elsevier when we had that faculty support solidly behind us and when we had the university's administration backing us. So, one of the key findings and this whole thing was how important it was to communicate to the faculty. Early and often. So we made ourselves present at lots and lots of faculty senate meetings we had open meetings for all the faculty and researchers on campuses we sent broadcast emails and open letters I spent a huge amount of time, carefully crafting letters to the faculty explaining what was going on and why it was okay and what we were doing to support them and so on. We required actually dedicated staff working on communications at various points in this process to make sure everybody understood what was happening. And as you can see from the article on the right. The media notice that one of the differences between our negotiation and some of the others in the US is that our faculty were very well informed and supportive of what we were doing. The other ways that we achieve that was through a lot of media outreach outside of the university because we've noticed that faculty in particular will get very interested in something that they read about in a national newspaper or regional newspaper like the LA Times. You can tell them something 10 times but when they read about it in the newspaper, especially if it's a positive article then that can really make a difference in their feelings about what's happening and what all of this did was lead to a real sense of pride. In the faculty that you see was doing this and that we were you know standing up to this publisher and really trying to do the right thing and the media were helpful in making that case. We're back in July of 2019 pre COVID times and you see gets cut off, and we were really expecting this to be difficult for everybody concerned. But the first thing that happened is a lot of faculty joined forces and decided to boycott Elsevier and refuse to serve on their editorial boards or do peer review and some of them even wouldn't publish articles with Elsevier and the libraries to do this we never asked the faculty to boycott the company, but they had just reached a point where they felt ownership of what was happening and they decided that they wanted to stand up for what you see wanted. I don't know if you can see Jennifer Doudna just got the Nobel Prize for CRISPR. So that's an example of the kind of people that we had supporting what we were trying to do but remember that that was the outcome of you know six or seven years of working with them to get them to that point. So then what happened in practice so we get data from Science Direct about how many so called turn a ways there are that's people trying to get to an article and hitting a paywall. January 2019 is before the cut off you can see the, the number of turn a ways was very small. Six months later a year later were six months into the cut off and actually the numbers not that much higher. So, definitely an uptick. That's quite a few more than there were before the shut off but not a huge number. Corresponding to that is the ILL statistics that we have so we've been tracking very carefully the ILL usage from before the cut off through till now. And this is a graph of it so what you see with the blue line is the complete all of our ILL. And those large peaks on the left are from before the pandemic. And that just shows you kind of a normal life cycle during an academic year with the two big peaks. And then the right side of the graph is post pandemic. And interestingly ILL despite the fact that everybody is working from home ILL statistics just went way down. So, in general, Elsevier is the orange line and as you can see that has held steady pretty much throughout but what's interesting about this is that you know from the beginning way over here on the left, it wasn't very high. It increased slightly now and then and gradually crept up to about 1000 per, what is this, two weeks, two periods. And we were quite worried about that because of course with ILL, at least here, if you cross a certain number of requests for certain articles then you have to pay a copyright fee it can get quite expensive and there was a lot of hand wringing about. Would we be able to afford to do this through our traditional services the answer is absolutely yes. It wasn't expensive. About six months in one of the things I pushed hard for was a sentiment poll of the faculty. So here we are in January of 2020. Roughly, and this is also pre pandemic, but we we just did a survey of the whole system so all 10 campuses and pretty much all the different types of academics that would typically use Elsevier journals. So we included faculty but also postdoctoral students or postdocs, graduate students, researchers and medical residents and staff because I'm sure many of you know that Elsevier journals include a lot of the key titles in the health sciences and they're heavily used by clinicians and medical students. And of course not surprisingly there was a high impact in the health disciplines which I'll talk about a little bit more in a minute. But what's interesting in these two pie charts is that the impact was about one third saying it was a significant impact and almost half saying well yeah, there's been some impact on me. And then this one on the right is the alternative access methods so we asked people well if you're not getting journal articles from Science Direct how are you getting them. And about almost a third here in this kind of light blue slice said I just gave up. I didn't try to get it. I found something else I could use. Another almost 30% said I found a copy online somewhere is good enough for me. And a lot asked a colleague who had access to Science Direct, and then another big chunk contacted the author, and this turned out to be anecdotally something that was kind of surprising and that is a lot of younger academics actually appreciated the reason to contact the corresponding author and make that connection to them and found that almost everybody would provide a copy of their article, happily, if somebody asked for it, which which we found a bit surprising. And then only 14% were availing themselves of our inner library loan service which which we found really interesting. The goal was that why how they felt about our situation remember this is January so we're six months in to the cut off. Just about 40% said they strongly supported UC schools, and then another 25% said well yeah it's a little inconvenient but I understand what UC is trying to accomplish, and I'm working around it. And that was that key demographic of people who would have been annoyed but we had done such a thorough job of making sure that the faculty knew what was happening and generally supported our position that they, they had this response. Another 17% I'm waiting to see how it will turn out so only 14%. And this is remember this is across a couple hundred thousand academics only 14% said this is frustrating. Right, that is very telling. The huge split between the health and non health disciplines, and that's important to understand because certainly at my institution, the hospital the medical center and the medical school are very important they bring in a ton of research money. So how they feel about this is really key. They were not happy campers so in the health system about. Well, it was the same breakout there was a healthy chunk almost a quarter saying I'll wait to see another chunk saying it's inconvenient but I'll deal with it, but 24% saying no this is really frustrating and 18% saying I, oh sorry, the 18% is the strongly support. So still we have the majority supporting us, but we see a pretty big slice saying now this is really frustrating and those are the people I was hearing from all the time, those those faculty that this was you know just unacceptably inconvenient for them, but it's it is a minority view. So in the health sciences is even stronger this this 45% slice is the you go, you know, we're with you. And then it diminishes down through the different categories but but we could see from this that six months in we still had very strong support for what we were doing, and then another year and a half go by and here we are with a new deal. So, I'll just briefly review what the terms of that deal were. I was just saying that the contract for this will be publicly available. One of our principles of negotiating this time was no nondisclosure agreements. So everything we did and agreed to is public information. We're just at the point of completing the memorandum of understanding so we don't have that contract and writing yet but you know, we know the terms of the deal and as Jeremy said, there may be interest in knowing more of the details and we can do that but probably not today it's a really complicated contract really really complicated. It takes a while to kind of walk through all of the different terms and conditions, but I'll just give you some of the high level stuff so first of all we have reading access with no fee for all of their journals. There I think we're four or five societies that just refuse to be part of this agreement. And that was it. Certainly of the English Language Journal I think there were a couple of European publishers non English that also opted out but the vast 99.99% of Elsevier journals are included in that reading access through Science Direct. We also got 100% open access for our corresponding authors, including cell press titles and the Lancet titles, which is as far as we know the first ever. That is open access publishing within article processing charge but we did negotiate a discounted article processing charge for authors. And this, the sum total of the agreement reduces our baseline spend with Elsevier from what it was two years ago with ongoing cost controls. So, I guess when you see the contract you'll see that the bottom line is we were paying a little less than we were before but we're getting a lot more for the money. And they've agreed to implement our multi payer model with that discount so that there's an APC for the journal but it's discounted by Elsevier and then the library subsidy is applied, and the author pays the balance. If the author can't pay the balance, the library will cover 100% of the fee. That's one of those details that we hope to get a lot more information about over the next four years is I should have said that it's a four year contract is how well will authors support that particular financial model. There are other benefits if the publication volume increases so lots more articles are published in their journals and authors are paying a share of the APC so there are cost controls for the library. But on the author side, you know, they, if there is more published than Elsevier can get some of that revenue. So, three important things are that the library and faculty work together on the negotiations there were faculty on our negotiating team. And while we didn't necessarily want exactly the same things as our top priority, we did develop shared priorities. So we, you know, the balance between trying to get cost savings versus trying to get more open access versus trying to get the right licensing terms. So there was a constant discussion within the UC's negotiating team, and that meant that we were on the same page with the negotiations with the publisher. So that deal that we got does respond to those 18 principles that the faculty had defined, including things like what rights authors can retain and the transparency of the whole deal. And that was really important to keep them engaged and involved in this process. So I would be remiss if I didn't point out that it's not just about Elsevier. This is our model for all publishers and all negotiations going forward. So we've already signed eight other agreements Elsevier is our ninth, including some fairly important publishers in the research library world so the Association of Computing Machinery. Cambridge University Press was actually our first open access contract under this model with the multi payer model in place. Some smaller journals, some gold journals like public library of science and JMI are most recently the Royal Society and then maybe a few months ago, Springer Nature, that was our first major commercial publisher and these are all very similar kinds of agreements to what I just described. Ultimately, we would like to have deals like this with every publisher, and we continue to work on our overarching pathways to open access plan which includes things like working with societies to help them shift to open access and whatever way makes sense for them. So, so it isn't just these big publisher negotiations but of course they're what catches the public attention, and also what the faculty feel the most. So to summarize all of that. It was really important that we had very clear goals for the negotiations that were broken out into specific terms that we wanted and a plan for that so being prepared on the same page aligned with the faculty that was critical. And I said this a million times already but having that solidarity with the research community community was, in our case, really, really important because they supported what we were doing they didn't try and go around our backs to, you know, make side deals we actually got all of our campuses and their different schools and colleges to agree not to resubscribe to any else of their journals while we were negotiating or out of contract, which trust me was very tempting to them to just go and get that journal back that they missed but they didn't do that. It turned out that alternative access provision was not a big deal I think a lot of researchers got very creative and how they found copies of articles, but they did confess that it wasn't the most convenient way for them to get access to this stuff they they missed the convenience of getting things through science direct, particularly in the health sciences. That constant communication is something that we hadn't necessarily really thought about before this all started but it was so clear from the beginning that it was making a huge difference that we just ended up dedicating a lot of resources to to doing that to this day. And so that's about it for my presentation and I'm going to stop sharing my screen now. And open it up for Q&A. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much Mackenzie I mean that was absolutely fascinating. Certainly from again from a UK perspective I could see things which was quite nice that we clearly have thought about and we picked up on some of the things you've identified as being important and strengths and the way you approach negotiation but clearly a range of other things we can, we can learn from from that which is great. And obviously what's enormously impressive is the kind of preparation work you've done over years to get yourself into a position where you had a community which was going to be ready I guess and supportive enough to take things forward. Got a couple of good some more questions coming in so please keep them out quite quickly now which is nice thank you. That always happens. Just one question to kick us off so I mean, you talked a lot about the advocacy piece I said I thought that was really good, but it was interesting in your chart that the health professionals were perhaps the least satisfied during the lockdown. When we talk about it we think about COVID it's the health professionals who benefited most from open access to content. Yes. That surprised you is there's some particular feature about the health professionals or had your communication perhaps not worked as well what was your reflection on that. I think it was just they were just telling us the truth that our health faculty are some of the strongest open access advocates on any campus, you know that it is life or death to them and covered has definitely illustrated that you all know right that the publishers dropped their paywalls for covered research and made it all open access because that was the right thing to do. The health faculty were telling us is that to them a little friction is a problem. You know for a lot of researchers having to wait a day or two to get your article. It's no big deal. But for some health science faculty, well there's sort of candidly there's two things going on here one is people who just think they're the most important people in the world and that you know they shouldn't wait for anything ever. There's a huge number of those but you know there's always some, and then there are people for whom it really is a problem. They're standing at a patient's bedside and they need to see this article now, you know. So, we had a, we did develop a really enhanced ILL service and emergency service where someone could submit a request for an article and we would get it within an hour or two. And that took a lot of work to set that up but it turned out it wasn't needed very often but when it was needed it was incredibly appreciated. Does that answer your question. Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for for going on that. Okay, so we do have quite a number of questions coming through so let's just start off with those first one at the top is. But during the day I suppose the the downtime when you didn't have the agreement, did Elsevier come back to you, or how did that negotiation start up again. After we stopped negotiating. There were you know occasional check-ins from both sides just, you know that Elsevier got a new CEO during that period of time that CEO was a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. And then they came to pass a visit and you know there were, you know, little conversations now and then but, but nothing over what's happening and then in June, they came back with a new proposal. I think I've been spent the new CEO spending a year or so, getting to know the company and the research community and all of this so so they made the first opening in this renegotiation and it took from June until about now to conclude that. So just imagine it so when they came back did it feel there was a difference in the way they were approaching you. Oh yeah, no before we ended the negotiations because we were not getting anywhere. Really not I mean just laughable accommodations, but when they came back in June it was clearly a different company. And I don't I'm not, you know, advocating for Elsevier or apologizing for Elsevier in any way, but but it was a serious offer that met, you know, a lot of the terms that we'd laid out before, and we could see that there was potential. And so the negotiating team decided that it was the right time to go back. Okay, looking at the next question so comment from one of our one of our audience that the same heartening to know that the effects of cancellation were not as profound as many people had worried. And which are still obviously in the UK trying to persuade that academics that will be okay if we have to go into that kind of situation. I want to mention about the, the kind of amount of perpetual access you had compared to what maybe the case in the UK and whether that was. Yes, yes that's a very good point okay so two things there one is that one of the ways that we calmed the faculty down at the threat of losing access was Germany. Germany had already been out of contract for Oh two years at that point. We were in conversation with the libraries there and the faculty there and learned that it, it wasn't as bad as people anticipated so we could tell our faculty. You know they said it's okay and, and they could check that with colleagues over there and here for themselves so that's another thing that the University of California will be doing for for you now is providing that backup. Not bad. Right so but it helped us to have Germany go first. And then of course we did have perpetual access to a lot of things through our previous license and it wasn't everything that we didn't have the freedom collection, you know we didn't have a lot of the things that people wanted so yes it reduced the demand on our alternative access strategies. That was very true at the beginning in 20 early 2019 but as time went by here we are two years later. So that perpetual access is not as helpful now as it was then, since most of the health sciences want the latest articles right. I mean did the graphs show show that kind of gradual change of the time that you were seeing less was being provided for from the perpetual access. I can't answer that question off the top of my head I'd have to go look at the turn away data from the last year, which I didn't bring with me but, but certainly the complaints didn't increase. In fact they've decreased. And obviously the graphs you showed us particularly that one about the interlibrary loan is quite fascinating. Yeah, never changed, right. We've not been in this the assumption is that that will be one of the things where we see significant change. Next question, just focus on the student community. How did your student community react when the Elsevier material was switched off that you have any negative impact on student experience I guess. Well the graduate students, I would classify as faculty, you know they use the journals and the same way as faculty undergraduates are not particularly big users of Elsevier titles other publishers more but. So they, we did keep them in the loop. They knew what was happening but they were not a huge stakeholder community in this. And actually some of our students I don't know if you know about the University of California but it's a very activist kind of institution. So if anything the students were very supportive because they don't like, you know, corporate monopolies. Did you, did you find did you do any communication particularly for the student group that you'd have to adjust your communications or did they just pick it up and what was going on. That's a very good point we didn't really we did some interviews with student newspapers. But the outreach wasn't really changed for that community because it wasn't going to impact them. Sometimes if there is a reading that they need to do in a class it's the instructor who goes and gets that article not the students so. Yeah that just that really wasn't a big issue to my knowledge. Thanks. You said quite a bit about the structures you had and you said how effective, you know your kind of boards and your different boards you had in place in the right mix. I just wondered I was hoping that you possibly had enough knowledge of how things are working in the UK and we are trying to in the UK level trying to get that combination of senior university leader with library staff and make that work. But I just wonder reflecting on what you've learned is there anything you think we can particularly learn in our situation. Of course we have multiple institutions rather than. Yeah, something particularly we should think about. Well, yeah, let me drill into that just slightly because what I was trying to point out is that our, when it comes to this kind of scholarly communication the customer is the individual researcher, or author, right. It's not the university governance, it's not the big research funding agencies. It really is a grassroots kind of thing. So, for us it was really important that all the faculty and researchers knew about what was happening and generally thought it was the right direction. And that's where our faculty Senate comes in because the faculty Senate is is their governance body and and it has weight and what I can't really explain is that normally, the faculty and the administration are directly opposed to each other on a lot of issues that that that's the more typical scenarios that the university administration wants to do something and the faculty want to fight it. This was an exception in that we were on the same page, and we made sure that the senior administration knew what was happening and supported us, but they weren't the ones who were insisting that this happened. It was the faculty. But, but we've got lucky because there's a particular way that the faculty are organized at the University of California that lets us know who we need to talk to that library committee is really important so so it. I've seen this play out and it can get to it's too complicated and too disorganized at a lot of institutions and actually in the UK, because you have such strong central governance of universities and funding and so on, it might actually be harder to get the average faculty member on board. But it was interesting you were saying I mean I heard that point about, you know the strength of those groups but even in the negotiation group there were still occasionally some different priorities about what people were. Right. Yeah, well that's, I mean that should be no surprise to anybody the faculty don't know anything about budgeting. You know that's not they don't care what the university is spending on this stuff, or we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place right I mean that's not their job to worry about that so so we had these two goals 100% open access and cost reduction. And that's all I meant is and we were not on different pages we were just trying to decide you know how much to insist on this versus that in the negotiations. Okay, so some other questions which have come in from the audience. So now that you've got your new deal in place. Is the feeling across faculty that it is entirely positive. This has been a really, what's the kind of reaction. Well it's been two days so it's hard to know exactly how to answer that but I'll just say that. And of course this is just anecdotal so don't take it too seriously but I got quite a lot of positive email from faculty when the announcement went out few we got what we wanted this is so great you know I've been holding my breath. So they clearly they did want a deal. I got maybe a handful of the well I'm still going to boycott Elsevier. I still hate them. You know, and I'm well that of course is your prerogative and I never told you not to you know. So I would say that yes of course there will still be faculty who feel very passionately about not supporting this commercial publishing model and hybrid journals and so on and that I'm glad that we still have those advocates out there. They're the reason we've gotten this far, but the vast majority faculty are quite happy I think. That's great. Thank you. So a few questions around about the communication and I guess messages so one comment here and I was really interested in your point about using external media to make an impact and that people get to because the kind of a more connected or in a way trust the Guardian article will get far more attention. So general question here about, you know what were the key messages which resonated with bits of the community and where the thing did you have to segment your audience at all to get certain messages to work better with different parts of your community. We, we didn't really I think. How do I put this. We definitely crafted each message very carefully. Which was really the same to all of them and maybe the way you express it the level of detail you include would be different if you're dealing with somebody who's intimately familiar with publishing or not. You know the way you talk to a faculty member who publishes 100 articles a year is different than the president of the university who hasn't published in 30 years right you know. So there's that kind of nuance but the message, the basic messages we are a public research institution. Our job is to get our research out to the public and the way to do that is with open access publishing so we need to make this work. Meanwhile we're paying a ridiculous amount of money for access to these journals and that has to change to you know so the message was very consistent. And the points never changed, just the way they were expressed. Again that's very encouraging to hear that. Okay. And one one another question around about I suppose Elsevier and I suppose there is a concern here and we know from previous negotiations that sometimes publishers will choose to go to try and go direct to our academic community. Oh yes. Yes. Yes, yes that happened. Yeah, early on. Yeah, no I don't think any of this is secret early on there was a lot of outreach by the company to authors and particularly through the editors who were members of our faculty to try to get them to create a kind of counter movement, and it failed. I think at that point the faculty were suspicious enough in general that they knew that they were being played somehow. Now there are exceptions I mean we I don't want to downplay this there were faculty and some very important people deans and so on of our colleges who had been editors of Elsevier journals for years and really liked working with the company or we're making a lot of money from their role with the you know so there were definitely voices on the campuses that were trying to change our strategy and influence us but they they were so few compared to the rest that it didn't really have an effect and so one thing we did do is tailor some of our outreach to the editors. And that took a lot of work because they know who the editors are for their journals but we don't necessarily so we had to do a lot of research to figure out just looking at mastheads and things like that. Who are the editors of journals that work for this university and can we reach out to them and talk to them about what's happening. So that in the bigger picture as that opened up some further conversations about the bigger open research open science type approach and the whole business of status. You know recognition thinking because when you're mentioning about the editors traditionally that will be something which would bring someone some status and I wonder whether this experience has given you an opportunity to open into those wider conversations. But the faculty have been having those conversations and as I showed in one of the slides there were several boycott efforts that were faculty sponsored from the beginning to try to you know get what we wanted out of the negotiations and I had quite a few people coming in with me regularly to say, can I, can I join this editorial board is that okay Mackenzie and I'm like, I'm not the boss of you to what you think is right. So, but they wanted to do the right thing. So I was just so, you know, pleased every time somebody asked me if it was okay to do a peer review or something, you know, but of course, yeah. So quite a few of our faculty did decline invitations to edit or peer review during this period. I don't know what their motives were for that it could have been just a good reason to say no, you know. So questions about preparations you may have made for alternative access when you're thinking about the walking away thing. Part of this. So, questions around about you know, did you set up any other ways of discovery for alternative open access. And did you do any pre I know you mentioned about into library alone but did you do any pre planning to try and on the assumption that you thought that there would be increased demand. So that that links back into the communications piece which turned out to be you know the most important and complicated part we, we did spend a lot of time developing guides for finding alternative copies of articles. Those are on every library's website, they were, we did a lot of training sessions and that. So that was important to do if just to reassure people that there are other ways to get these articles, you know, so we did a lot of that and we also as I said we we retooled our inner library loan system. So that we had this tiered model where there was kind of a default request and then there was this emergency access request. And at the beginning that was very important to have. So yeah, we put a good six months worth of work into making sure it was as good as it could be. Interesting comment I think it was kind of follows on from that. The whole business of alternative ways that you could get hold of material. We know all of us know there are a variety of ways active where you in promoting some of these alternative. We stuck very carefully to the legal, legally available sources. We include things like research gated, you know, that we considered a legit source we never, we never promoted the other places where you can get journal articles however, researchers aren't stupid. So they talked to each other and I think there was a fair use amount of use of it at least at the beginning but nothing that we promoted. Okay. Interesting question which you might not be able to answer but did you have a sense when, when you reach the point that you're going to have to walk away as to how long you thought you're going to be able to survive. Or did you have any kind of sense in your head as to how long this you could hold out in that situation or was it something which didn't come. You know that that's a really interesting question I haven't really thought about that but I think again Germany's example was very front of mind for us. We've been out of contract for two years and I talked to my colleagues there and they said, you know, it's been really quiet, we could go on like this forever. So that was kind of our mindset, I think is that if it dragged on, that was okay. And we, we didn't re approach. Elsevier because we were realizing that we could keep going. We didn't want to our faculty wanted to deal someday, but we weren't going to have to give in. And it was also very interesting to see your pulse survey after six months. So clearly there was some dissatisfaction but actually, again, I think if most people have been asked what you think kind of response you're going to get. That pulse survey was a little nuanced right because it gave people the chance to say I really support what you're trying to do, but then there was this one that's well you know this is kind of hard for me but I stand with you. And so, those are the people who wanted the deal, again, but we're willing to wait as long as it took. And they were not an insignificant number of people. So, yeah. Okay, obviously a lot of positive comments about your talks and thank you very much from the audience. One particular question about green green. Yep. Is that, can you say is that part of the deal is an element of that within the new deal. Yes, that's a really good question because it's not explicitly in the deal because this is a publishing read agreement, but there were a lot of discussions about that with them because we still have our senate, our faculty senate open access policy that requires them to deposit their articles any scholarship so that that hasn't changed and there are authors who've already told me that they're going to keep doing that. And they haven't even opt out of open access with the journal, because they just don't think it's the right model right and so we did spend a fair amount of time working with Elsevier on the terms under which authors can self deposit. We got them to move, you know, a fair way forward so they're no longer going to require waivers. Okay, and I think we're still debating which license because we want the most liberal license CC by for those, they would like something a little more restrictive. So that is still an active conversation but we haven't given up that that's going to continue. Okay, good to hear that. Thank you very much. One more specific question going back to the interlibrary loan just somebody interested, particularly in a bit more detail perhaps about what preparations you put in place to ensure that interlibrary loan could expand if it was needed to do that. Well, we actually so we staffed up in the summer of 2019 and assumed that, you know, we would be dealing with an onslaught that never happened. So we over anticipated what would need to be done then the demand barely increased at all. So I mean who knows if it would be exactly the same there but what we found, I'll be quite honest, library I alone systems are hard to use. And humanists have gotten used to it, and they can be patient. The kinds of researchers who use science directory day are not willing to wait and deal with the forums and the you know all of that stuff so I think they just found it was much easier to find that article on the web, or get it from the author or something like that. That's my opinion anyway. Thank you very much. Okay, so it's still questions coming in so try and work our way through those. We're going back to that whole point about the change of approach. You've referenced obviously that there was a change in CEO during the period. Do you think that was the main factor or the other factors at play which which led to the change in approach. I want to try to pretend I know how Elsevier manages itself, but I think the new CEO definitely did take a fresh look at the whole thing and with a different mindset. That I think also the fact that we had walked away and that we weren't showing any signs of pain told them something because to have both Germany and the University of California which are about the same size actually. That's a bad sign you know if more institutions walked away and stayed away. That would strengthen the library communities. Feeling that this this publisher doesn't matter anymore. So they, they can't let that go on forever. Yeah. I want to question here about in terms of your approach whether it was influenced by any of the discussions which are going on with funders, what their requirements might be. So whether that suppose that had been part of your thinking as you are setting up your strategy and had that influence how you were thinking about what kind of agreement you might need to have in place. Yes, well, as I said the model we have is a multi pair model so it does matter very much where researchers get their funds and what they can do with those funds, but in the US. Most of the major federal research funding agencies do allow publication fees, and many of them require open access, although it's often in a institutional repository or in PubMed central something like that. The agencies are typically very supportive of open access. And we, we had to come up with a model that could leverage that funding, which led to our multi pair model. Fantastic. Yeah, we're almost at the end of the list so. Wow. Hope you've managed to survive the grilling but just to say, I think a couple of quick ones so just after cancellation did you feel a need to re subscribe to any of the titles during the dark period. As I said, that was top of mind for a lot of people and we agreed the libraries agreed not to. Okay, and we reached out and asked the deans of all the schools and colleges not to. So we decided no, I think there were a handful of print subscriptions that continued. Maybe I can't remember if we had the clinics titles during that time. There were things that weren't part of our license that we may have continued to have but not the journals. Okay. One quick question just going back to green, do you have any embargo period on that being asked. Was it just straight to straight to open if someone deposits as far as we know there is no embargo period for those I that actually came up yesterday and and there's some conflicting information between Elsevier's website and. So anyway, as far as I know there is no embargo on self deposit. Fantastic. So I think one more question and I think it's a really appropriate one to wrap things up on so it's that kind of reflection question. What do you think is the most important thing we you've learned from this process and I guess from our perspective what's the most important thing we could take out from your experience. Wow, wow, that's, I mean I've already talked about the important things like making sure that the faculty are in the loop and generally support you and being clear about what you want to get out of the deal but I think, having been in the library profession now for many decades. There's a certain fear factor that we have that we're the weak, the weak part of the equation and that they're the strong part of the equation that proved not to be true. In this case that we were in the power position and it took us a while I think to really believe that. The negotiating team they may have known from the beginning that that was the case but I think we all went into this just fearful of what might happen and nothing bad well nothing bad. It was not an easy two years, but certainly I feel now like we could do this again, you know, if things don't go well and we need a new contract in four years we can do it again. And so we've kind of crossed a bridge now in that confidence that this that we do have power in the research library and research university community to get what we want. Thank you Mackenzie and I think that's a fantastic message for us. And I think particularly, you know, that ability for us to reference both your experience and as you've mentioned the German experience to will be of enormous benefit for us as in the UK as we try and move forward with our negotiations. So just like to say I think it's been a really fascinating session with you thank you for your time and be willing to go into so much detail and to answer so many questions. It has been, you know, I think certainly been inspirational. It's been really for me I think that key point about how you have been able to, and here, I've been able to develop that really strong relationship with your academic community, and get them to be working alongside you to allow you to achieve what you want to achieve out of this negotiation. They deserve so much credit actually Jeremy because the library community always works with each other, you know we're used to doing that, but we had faculty advocates who really worked hard on behalf of this cause, you know, and they had to deal with that huge diversity of opinion and openness among the faculty and they had to be very brave to kind of navigate that and stay the course so I give them a huge amount of credit but yeah.