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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.
When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.
But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.
Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.
The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday February 15 2020, @07:14PM
Fair point, and that's part of why I left my comment ambiguous. Leaving a little bit of thinking up to the reader can be helpful.
The librarians are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They only have budgets to support bringing in $X dollars of new material. If Elsevier is sucking up 25% of that and they could get more material for the same money, then the choice is an easy one to make.