Opening the pod bay doors: Elsevier and the future of Open Access | Knowledge Utopia

"Elsevier recently started offering Open Access options for most of its publications. A video highlitghts the new options authors have when they want to publish with Elsevier.  But for a very long time, Elsevier and others have been seen as being all about profits. By bundling journals, Elsevier sells top journals such as The Lancet, with other less prestigious ones (the subscription costs thousands of dollars for each journal per year). Elsevier also has a 37-40% margin, which makes people wonder, especially librarians, if it isn’t just greed that runs Elsevier.  Moreover, Elsevier’s transition to Open Access could be a very very tough sell for shareholders and employees. The Open Access options it offers are relatively high priced (between 600 and 3000$ per article), and new competitors such as PeerJ are smashing prices (PeerJ offers an unlimited lifetime publication «permit» for just 299$).  And as Elsevier is a very big company, with lots of services, employees, it doesn’t have the flexibility a young start up like PeerJ can have on prices.  So, here are some questions about the future of academic publishing: will the Open Acces movement kill Elsevier, or how will Open Access change Elsevier? Free access to knowledge will only be possible if big publishers fully embrace Open Access. Are they ready for it? ..."