FreshEd #118 – Why did Sweden cancel its agreement with Elsevier? (Wilhelm Widmark)

On June 30th, Sweden will officially cancel its agreement with Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in the world. No longer will new journal articles or books published by Elsevier be available in any Swedish university or library. Why is this happening? What’s behind the disagreement between Elsevier and Sweden?   Today Wilhelm Widmark, the Library Director at Stockholm University, joins me to talk about the state of academic publishing. Widmark serves as the Vice-Chair of the Swedish Bibsam Consortium steering committee, the group that negotiates agreements with publishers on behalf of universities and libraries across the country. Although he criticizes Elsevier for charging excessively high prices on academic publications, he places most of the blame on the academic system of meritocracy that is based on academic publications.