The leading French scientific institution @CNRS is cancelling its subscription of Springer journals: all access will be closed in a few days
Elsevier should be next on the list. The 173 millions $ national licence is due to be renewed in 2019. The current agreeement was disclosed in 2014 by @MaliciaRogue and I in the French media nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-no…
The bargaining position of big publishers has clearly become weaker in the last few years. Pirate libraries (like sci-hub) and, more importantly, the wide availability of OA content have made loss of access much less painful.
The French cancellations is only the latest development in an international movement w/ "difficult" agreements (Netherlands, Finland…) and full-scale block probably leading to cancellation (Germany…)
The billion-dollar monopolies on scientific journal subscriptions born in the 1960s is probably doomed. Yet the future state of OA publishing is still uncertain.
There's a lot of talks currently on "journal flipping": the idea that all the money spent on subscription would be diverted to APCs (w/ institution wide "right to publish" in OA journals). May seem good on paper but in reality will only maintain insanely high pub costs.
Besides there's currently a worrying diversification of big publishers activities toward institutional repositories (w/ Elsevier acquisition of SSRN or Bepress) or univ management tools that may well reestablish new forms of monopolies/dependencies.
The silver lining is that he publishing ecosystem is actually becoming more diverse (not only through new private companies but also through new public structures and community-run organisations that can hardly be bought back).
