Scholarly Resources: Acquisitions & Cancellations

In 2021, Mason Libraries unbundled our Elsevier journal package of over 1,500 journals and subscribed instead to a custom package of around 220 individual Elsevier journals. We achieved this through an amendment to our Elsevier contract, negotiated along with five other members of the Virginia Research Libraries (VRL) group -- the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University, William & Mary, and James Madison University.  

Despite reducing our Elsevier spend by almost 50% for 2021, the Elsevier journals contract remained the single largest item in Mason Libraries’ collections budget. When the University required all units to absorb additional budget reductions in fiscal years 2024 and 2025, we again took a closer look at our Elsevier journal package.   

After extensive analysis and outreach throughout 2024, the Libraries have made additional cuts to our Elsevier journal subscriptions. Effective January 1, 2025, we will subscribe to 104 Elsevier journals (view title list, an Excel file viewable by anyone in George Mason University's Microsoft 365 environment).  Mason researchers can still access articles from cancelled journals via several channels, including interlibrary loan and Article Express, a pilot service that typically delivers a PDF within seconds of a request.  

Our cancellation and retention decisions were informed by thoughtful, nuanced analysis of carefully compiled data about our Elsevier subscriptions. We sought faculty input via surveys, email, and other outreach. As always, we considered a wide range of measures, including download counts and cost per download, Mason author citation and publication rates, and the percentage of articles published open access in each journal. We also considered the balance of cancellations across disciplines and the relative size of different journals’ target audiences.   

We recognize that any subscription cancellation may impact research, teaching, and grant-writing, therefore we are committed to providing timely access to Elsevier articles from unsubscribed journals. We now meet demand for Elsevier content through our remaining subscriptions, backfile content, open access repositories, and expedited PDF delivery services for newer, paywalled articles.  

We currently have two options for PDF delivery:   

• Article Express pilot: Mason faculty and graduate students may test out Article Express, our pilot PDF-on-demand service with near-instant delivery. Simply enter your article title in the Mason Libraries Search box on the library website, click on your article in the search results, sign in to see access options, and click through to place your Article Express request.  

• Interlibrary Loan: Anyone with a gmu.edu email address may  request an article via our constantly innovating ILLinterlibrary loan (ILL) service. ILL now delivers an article PDF in two hours to two business days request, with particularly speedy service for Elsevier articles. Tip: For expedited service, use the DOI request option under New Requests.   

If you have questions about our Elsevier journal access or any other aspect of our collections, please reach out to your subject librarian.