Hi,

as a little background:

The Dutch government put down a requirement to the universities that they have to provide open access to their publications, i believe from the top of my head 60% open access in 5 years, 100% in 10. At the same time, the universities are renewing their X-year contract with major publishers, and this is the first time [citation needed] they put together their negotiating powers and negotiate through their Universities association. This is the negotiations about access to works published by (in this case) Elsevier. It seems the discussions got bundled (which makes sense given the fact that the business model has to change). To me, this feels mostly that universities are playing it hard, and they simply tell their researchers now "doom and fail, from 1 january, you can't access Elsevier papers any more, because they don't meet our demands" which of course gets lots of press attention, and might help Elsevier to lower their price and conditions. 

I would be highly surprised if Elsevier and the universities would actually not come to an understanding before the deadline. So yes, the focus is on publishing and access to Dutch publications by the whole world, but please note that this is a precondition for re-use. And also, you'll probably have a hard time to explain the scientist community why their papers should be reusable... especially with all the plagiarism discussions going on currently (in the Netherlands and also Germany I think). Lets count our blessings, and be happy if the Netherlands universities are able to make good deals and change the business model - that would be a big leap already I think (most countries are not even close to this, to the best of my knowledge, although the rumour has it that the UK is going the same way). 

Also, to be able to create compendia of free knowledge, /access/ to publications is the first necessary step of course. Being able to copy and edit papers would be a nice to have, but that would also first require being able to see it :) 

Finally, this would 'only' be locked down for 5 or 10 years I think, another cycle, another revolution. 

Following these discussions with a lot of interest from closeby,

Lodewijk

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 10:16 PM, Yana Welinder <ywelinder@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Interesting development.  Thanks for forwarding, Dimi!  >From the press release, it sounds like they were focusing of accessibility rather than free reuse.  It would be nice to be able to add reuse to the agenda for these kind of negotiations, before they reach deadlock of course.

Best, 

Yana

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Dimitar Dimitrov <dimitar.dimitrov@wikimedia.de> wrote:

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: LIBLICENSE <liblicense@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 6:11 PM
Subject: Elsevier & Dutch universities in a stand-off
To: LIBLICENSE-L@listserv.crl.edu


From: Jos Damen <josephcmdamen@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 11:58 AM

"Negotiations between Elsevier and universities failed (PRESS RELEASE
VSNU, 4 November 2014)

Universities want to move to Open Access publications

Negotiations between the Dutch universities and publishing company
Elsevier on subscription fees and Open Access have ground to a halt.
In line with the policy pursued by the Ministry of Education, Culture
and Science, the universities want academic publications to be freely
accessible. To that end, agreements will have to be made with the
publishers. The proposal presented by Elsevier last week totally fails
to address this inevitable change. The universities hope that Elsevier
will submit an amended proposal. ‘From now on we will inform our
researchers about the consequences of this deadlock’, says Gerard
Meijer, president of Radboud University Nijmegen and chief negotiator
on behalf of the VSNU."

More: http://www.vsnu.nl/news/newsitem/11-negotiations-between-elsevier-and-universities-failed.html

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