More than 30 professors will no longer serve on editorial boards of the journals unless Elsevier and the University of California can reach a contract.

The university and the publisher have been trying to forge a new licensing agreement for the last year.

Under a two-year pilot agreement, articles published by Norwegian academics will be free to read in almost all of the publisher’s journals.

The divergent strategies of scholarly publishers to forge licensing agreements with libraries are yielding different results.

The publisher failed to meet requests for better access to research, a consortium of Norwegian institutions says.

After negotiating for eight months, the University of California becomes one of the first research institutions in the US to stop paying for access to the publisher’s journals.

The three-year contract, in which all articles will be published as open access in exchange for an annual fee for journal subscriptions, is a triumph for Project DEAL.

The move is a show of support for Project DEAL and the open-access movement.

The UC system is pushing to change the subscription model and accelerate open access, but if there’s no contract agreement by December 31, faculty and students lose access altogether.