Let it go – Cancelling subscriptions, funding transitions | PLOS Opens

There are essentially two ways to realise the potential savings of an OA environment, or equally to minimise the costs of transition. The first is to negotiate with subscription publishers for a direct rebate where Open Access payments are made. The UK, with RCUK and Wellcome money backing the transition, has led on negotiations with the Royal Society of Chemistry and Institute of Physics both offering some form of direct rebate – essentially what an institution pays in APCs to a publisher gets taken off the subscription costs. This is presumably what the Netherlands was seeking to put into the Elsevier agreement. The second approach is more radical. Cut subscriptions, rely on access via repositories or personal requests in the short term for access, and directly use the liberated budgets to support Open Access. The second approach gives an institution much more flexibility but obviously at the risk of reduced access and potential researcher anger. No doubt researchers across the Netherlands are currently receiving messages from Elsevier concerned about their potential loss of access and keen to make the case for continued subscriptions. Lets look at these two options from a purely financial perspective. There are a number of problems with access to data but with some available data and educated guesses we can work through the figures ... So the irony is that cancelling the Elsevier subscription would liberate enough money to make accessible all those articles the Netherlands currently publishes with Elsevier, but not if they were published by Elsevier. In a pure OA world at Elsevier prices the Netherlands would pay over €74M (at the Wellcome rate) ... The reality is that if the Netherlands wants to use the leverage that their resources provides they should cancel the subscription and liberate the funding. Those resources can be used to shape the future scholarly communications market. This analysis is highly sensitive to the average cost of APCs paid. The Netherlands, with the resources available to it, has the leverage to shape the market. They could choose to spend that money so as to reduce APCs by favouring lower cost suppliers. This will help to realise the potential savings that an Open Access environment could bring. They could use liberated resources to fund APCs. Alternately they could support new publishing ventures or platforms for low cost publication. All of these are possible – all of these would have a massive boost from €7M. None of them are possible without cutting subscriptions."