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Journal publisher Elsevier has agreed to open up some of the research published by Dutch researchers... by 2018:
A standoff between Dutch universities and publishing giant Elsevier is finally over. After more than a year of negotiations—and a threat to boycott Elsevier's 2500 journals—a deal has been struck: For no additional charge beyond subscription fees, 30% of research published by Dutch researchers in Elsevier journals will be open access by 2018.
"It's not the 100% that I hoped for," says Gerard Meijer, the president of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the lead negotiator on the Dutch side. "But this is the future. No one can stop this anymore."
The dispute involves a mandate announced in January 2014 by Sander Dekker, the Dutch minister responsible for higher education. It requires that 60% of government-funded research papers should be free to the public by 2019, and 100% by 2024. His argument, one echoed by academics around the world, is that the public has traditionally paid twice for research: once to fund the research and then again to read the results. But for-profit publishing companies like Elsevier have argued that someone has to pay for the cost of the publication, either universities paying for subscriptions, or scientists paying article processing charges to make their papers open access. (Advocates counter that the prices for both are too high considering that most of the editing and all of the reviewing is unpaid work done by academics.)
This isn't the first time researchers have agitated against Elsevier. An unenforced boycott against Elsevier journals has been running for years in the United Kingdom, though with little impact, and some universities have tried to play hardball. The Dutch gambit was different, Meijer says. "For one thing, it helped that Elsevier is based in Amsterdam," he says. "It would be very bad for them to lose the Dutch scientific community." Meijer admits that the Netherlands is a small fish. "We only publish about 2% of academic papers. But the quality of our papers is above average and we're big enough to be taken seriously."
Previously: Elsevier Cracks Down on "Pirate" Science Search Engines
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @05:45PM
But it'll take an established brand name to do it, probably a consortium of top universities, or a company that signs up the same, and then carefully works out the business model to the satisfaction of the various stakeholders.
A bunch of academics saying they're going to start the International Online Journal of Astronomical Studies and releasing everything under GPLv3 isn't going to get it done.