As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.
This is some crazy bad-ass news. Almost everyone I know in higher education tweeted this article out today.
Now if only we could get them to all go IndieWeb using a Domain of Their Own and practice academic samizdat…
@chrisaldrich @danyork I would think with Functions and/or low cost virtual servers provided by major cloud providers, it should be straught forward and linearly expensive to operate a Domain of Their Own instance.
Hmm … made me wonder. How do companies like Elsevier fund themselves/recover costs if acquiesce to the University of California and any other entities demanding the same?
I think the bigger issue is that it’s commonly known that Elseiver and others are essentially minting money and not adding as much value to the process for what they receive. They could afford to drastically cut their prices and still make more than comfortable margins while creating more competition and innovation in the space. Their business model is a complicated tangle that includes non-disclosure agreements to University subscribers preventing them from discussing their rates with their peers to prevent better competition. A quick web search on the topic should unearth loads of articles and even government testimonies about their (and other major publishers’) competitive and problematic business practices.