Consult online resources

• The electronic resources of Sorbonne University Library are accessed remotely by students logging into their personal institutional account. Never share logins with a third party.
• In accordance with the licenses that the Library signs with each supplier, it is forbidden to download massive amounts of data (articles, ebooks, etc.), under pain of the automatic blocking of the account.
• Icons indicate the theme(s) covered by the resources. Click on the icons to access all other resources on the topic (tutorials and databases).
• An icon also tells students whether a tutorial is available to make the best use of the resource.    Consult the online guides and tutorials.

Sorbonne University is a member of the Couperin consortium for the negotiation of electronic resources. Find a regularly updated status report on negotiations concerning our subscriptions (updated: 30 January 2020).

Background

Nearly half of all subscriptions to Sorbonne University's electronic resources, including all of the most expensive scientific journal packages, are part of the Couperin consortium negotiation framework. The Couperin consortium is an association bringing together more than 260 institutions of Higher Education and Research (the ESR) whose main goal is to evaluate, negotiate and organise the purchase of electronic resources for the benefit of its members. If a negotiation fails because the initial objectives have not been met, institutions may negotiate their subscription with the publisher/supplier on an individual basis. If the offer is validated by Couperin, they are free to refuse it.
2018 was a turning point in the document policy of Sorbonne University, which adopted a firm stance with regard to the pricing practices of the major scientific journal publishers, including in the case of validated Couperin offers.
These practices are based on an annual and continuous inflation of the subscription price with a view to guaranteeing the publisher a constant increase—at the very least—in its turnover. Above all, the subscription price generally fails to take into account either the growing share of open access content or the expenses incurred by institutions for the publication of open access articles (APC).

In this context, notable for Sorbonne University's commitment to open science, negotiations with publishers are becoming tougher and can sometimes lead to disruption, and therefore to the unsubscribing of certain resources and the removal of access.

Latest negotiations completed:

• Elsevier (Freedom Collection, Cell Press, French Medical Library) (national license 2019-2022)
• ACS Publications (contrat 2020)
• APS Journals (contrat 2020)
• Proquest « Sciences Humaines » (contrat 2020-2022)
• ACM Library (contrat 2020)

Last negotiations rejected by SU:

• Bundles of Springer magazine (2018-2021) - access cut in 2019
• IEL base of the IEEE - access cut off in 2019
• Nature magazines - access cut off in 2020