RELX Shares Fall After University of California Drops Journal Subscriptions

By Adria Calatayud

Shares in RELX PLC (REL.LN) fell Friday, hit by news that the University of California has terminated its subscriptions with the company's scientific-journal-publishing unit Elsevier.

The UC said Thursday that Elsevier was unwilling to secure open access--making research available for free--to the university's research while containing rising costs of for-profit journals, despite months of contract negotiations.

The UC aimed to make open access the default for research produced by its 10 campuses while stabilizing journal costs for the university by integrating subscription charges and open access publishing fees, it said. However, Elsevier proposed to charge UC authors publishing fees on top of the university's subscription, the university said.

Elsevier told Dow Jones Newswires that it was disappointing that the UC's California Digital Library had broken off negotiations unilaterally. During the negotiations, Elsevier proposed a model that supported the university's open-access request and provided a path to reduce the costs for each campus library, the business said.

Elsevier said it hoped the divide with the UC could be bridged soon.

Shares in Elsevier parent RELX at 1207 GMT were down 4.6% at 1,649 pence, in their biggest one-day percentage drop since November 2016, making the company one of the top fallers in London's FTSE 100.

Write to Adria Calatayud at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 01, 2019 07:39 ET (12:39 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.