Paywall for Elsevier magazines to go
VSNU, the overarching university organisation, announced this on Tuesday. The publisher says the Netherlands is the first country to have a deal of this magnitude.
The VSNU, the Federation of Medical Centres, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and Elsevier have agreed that 95 percent of all Dutch academic articles will become open access immediately.
No paywall
The deal with Elsevier means that anyone in the world has access to the Dutch articles in Elsevier’s academic journals, without running into a paywall. People used to have to get a subscription to the academic journals to read the articles.
The publisher’s revenue model has been a point of contention between the academic community and publishers, especially since the subscriptions kept getting increasingly expensive, while the people writing the articles also performed editorial work for free and did peer reviews.
Publishing costs
By embracing open access, Elsevier, like publisher Springer before it, is making a big step towards a new kind of revenue model. They’ll no longer charge for subscription, but for publishing rights. These costs will not be passed on to the individual academics. In this new deal, Elsevier gets 16.5 million.
Academic and institutes will own their own research data, although Elsevier will have access to the research institutes’ metadata. This concerns information about who publishes where, and how often and where articles are being downloaded.