How Elsevier plans to sabotage Open Access – Medium

"If open access is to succeed it is no exaggeration to assume this would require a major, and international, shift in the culture of publishing. Some have therefore even argued that because of the nature of the publishing industry, the major houses can never be part of a solution. Their inherent interest is not the dissemination of information, it is profit. However, many researchers, for a myriad of reasons, still want their work to be published in high-impact journals and care deeply about their citation scores.

Elsevier knows this, and knows that for the time being it controls the keys to this gate. As with fossil fuels the parties controlling the resources will do everything in their power to draw every last drop of revenue from the old system before making the shift to a new system. This is essentially what Elsevier is doing with this so called ‘pilot’ for open access: giving in just enough to prevent any major alteration to the status quo."