The Interlibrary Loan Policy for electronic journals is included in each institution’s agreement with Elsevier for ScienceDirect. In short, the provision allows and provides for the use of electronic journal articles as a source for the fulfillment of Interlibrary Loan (ILL) requests with some provisions.

Interlibrary Loan Conditions

This grant applies only to journals published by Elsevier. Other publishers have different conditions or may not permit interlibrary loans. The licensor grants the subscriber the right to use articles from subscribed content in the case of ScienceDirect as source material for interlibrary loans subject to the following conditions:

• The ILL request comes from an academic or other non-commercial, non-corporate research library located in the same country as the subscriber.
• The requested article is printed by the subscriber and mailed, faxed or transmitted by Ariel (or a similar ILL system) to the requesting library.  

A Note on National Boundaries

Interlibrary loan and document delivery activities, and the legal basis for such activities, vary from country to country. As an international publisher, Elsevier has worked hard to establish an international level playing field, where all libraries can provide documents to libraries on the same terms and conditions. Those terms are intended to support domestic ILL. They are also intended to reign in those libraries who have abused ILL and provide what is more accurately described as document delivery to anyone anywhere in the world in the name of ILL.

In the US, ILL operates within the   CONTU guidelines, which provide a balance between free ILL and payments to publishers. The responsibility for adhering to CONTU rests with the requesting, not the fulfilling, library. Requesting libraries located outside of the US are not part of the CONTU agreement and have no restriction on the number of copies requested on a free (no royalty) basis. That is not a level playing field.

Elsevier recognizes that there are less developed countries in the world and libraries that cannot afford to purchase subscriptions or individual articles. For that reason we were a founding partner in the HINARI/AGORA/OARE programs and continue to give them our strong support. Under these programs libraries in 69 countries have completely free access to Elsevier journals (and the journals of more than 110 other publishers). In an additional 44 countries, a single annual fee of $1000 (which does not go to the publisher but supports the program administrators) assures access to the journals of all publishers participating in these programs.

If a ScienceDirect subscriber library has a partner library in one of these countries, we believe that it will help that partner library the most to introduce that library to the HINARI/AGORA/OARE programs and even, if necessary, pay the annual fee on their behalf. That action opens the library to a wealth of information that they can access themselves on an unrestricted basis. We strongly believe that is in the best interest of all libraries and researchers. It is for that reason, for example, that Elsevier made a $80,000 grant to the Medical Library Association for Hinari training. We hope others will join in this effort.