National Subscription for Access to Elsevier's Full-Text Scientific Databases

This procurement contract aims to provide access to electronic databases owned by Elsevier, including Science Direct, Scopus, and SciVal, for a duration of four years. Since the introduction of electronic libraries and national subscriptions in 2008, researchers, students, and educators in Bulgaria have had access to a vast number of full-text articles, citations, abstracts, and references (over 60 million), covering all scientific fields. Science Direct offers access to electronic versions of over 2,000 journals in areas such as Economics, Engineering, Information Technology, Law, Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, Space Sciences, Biology, Business Administration, Management, Ecology, Arts, Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Mathematics, Metallurgy, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Operations Research, Linguistics, Medicine, Education, Chemistry, Physics, and Humanities. SCOPUS is a citation database with over 85 million unique records from 7,000 scientific publishers and more than 100,000 conferences, indexing over 11,000 new publications daily. The analytical tool SciVal, linked to SCOPUS, allows for analyses regarding various quality indicators and comparability of scientific results, such as the number of publications by Bulgarian authors in the top 10% most cited publications in specific scientific fields worldwide, as well as international collaboration and measuring the impact of scientific organizations and individual researchers from Bulgaria on the development of specific scientific directions, funding sources for research, and other indicators measuring research outcomes overall and in comparison with other countries and regions in Europe and the world. SCOPUS and SciVal provide data sources and indicators for evaluating scientific results when determining research universities, ranking systems, annual assessments of scientific activity, and more. The electronic books cover 28 scientific fields and consist of 7,400 titles. Research on the benefits of national subscriptions shows that Bulgaria's scientific output, relative to 1 million euros spent on research and development, ranks the country ahead of Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia (2015 - 2020) in terms of scientific results relative to science expenditures. From 2022 to 2025, Bulgarian researchers published over 27,985 articles (data generated on May 19, 2025), of which 18,611 were in Elsevier journals. A parallel check in Web of Science showed that Elsevier is the primary publisher in whose journals Bulgarian researchers publish (3,809 articles in the last 5 years, as of May 19, 2025), followed by Springer Nature (3,350 articles), accounting for 22.4% and 21.0% of all articles in the top 10 foreign publishers, respectively. In 2022, a transformative agreement (with elements of a 'gold' open access model) was signed, during which over 240 articles by Bulgarian authors were published in open access. The ScienceDirect database includes all full-text journals and books owned by Elsevier. All journals and books from the Freedom Collection Journals and eBooks All Access collection are offered in a bundled package under the name ScienceDirect. A review of usability shows that each month from January 2024 to February 2025, there were over 50,000 searches in the ScienceDirect database. During the same period, searches for books in ScienceDirect ranged from 2,000 to 5,000 per month. The usability of SCOPUS, as a citation database with bibliometric information, measured in terms of publication searches, is around 2-3 million per year, while the metrics from SciVal are used over 400,000 times a year.