The University of California has struck a blow for the Open Access movement by terminating its subscriptions to all Elsevier journals. UC and Elsevier have been in negotiation for some time trying to find a way to make UC research results—about 10% of all US research publications—available to everyone without cost. Sadly, those negotiations failed but UC stood by their principles and dropped their subscriptions.
That’s not like you or me dropping Amazon Prime or using DuckDuckGo instead of Google. Who would notice or care? UC on the other hand spent multiple millions of dollars on Elsevier subscriptions and as a leading university system stands as an example to the other big consumers of Elsevier publications. Their defection has to smart, especially if other universities follow their example.
As I’ve said before, journal publishers are solving a problem that no longer exists. Research can, and should be, distributed on line. That’s mostly what Open Access is all about. The publishers continue to exist and thrive only because universities continue to base their tenure and promotion decisions on a faculty member’s record of publishing in “top flight” journals, which, of course, means that junior faculty must publish in such journals if they want to survive.
Already, though, many senior faculty are refusing to publish in, or referee for, journals that don’t make the research available to anyone without cost. Once the tenure and promotion committees get onboard, it’s hard to see how big publishers like Elsevier are going to survive with their current business models. Of course, there’s hardly any institution more stodgy and resistant to change than such committees so who knows what will happen.
Regardless, we can all cheer UC’s decision and hope that other universities follow suit.