Over last few days we witnessed Elsevier reaching a new 5-year deal with French Universities, for 33,4 M euro's per year: http://scoms.hypotheses.org/293. The deal is also said to have a data mining paragraph. Almost at the same time news broke that Dutch universities did not accept Elsevier's offer for a new deal for the years ahead: http://www.vsnu.nl/news/newsitem/11-negotiations-between-elsevier-and-universities-failed.html. The Dutch required major steps towards Open Access, but apparently Elsevier did not want to move enough to satisfy the Dutch negotiators. According to the press release by VSNU, the Dutch association of universities, researchers are now likely faced to have no access to Elsevier journals from January 2015. In a dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, the negotiators said that perhaps scholars will need to email authors to get access, or to use versions available in repositories. I think this is a major test case: a full small country (although medium sized in research output) having no access to new content in Elsevier journals.
Jeroen Bosman
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