After a months-long standoff, a consortium of hundreds of South Korean universities has reached a new deal with scientific publisher Elsevier for access to ScienceDirect, a database containing content from 3,500 academic journals and thousands of electronic books. The agreement includes price hikes between 3.5% and 3.9%, which were concluded shortly before 12 January, the day Elsevier had threatened to cut access to ScienceDirect. The publisher had pushed for a 4.5% increase.