Meanwhile, German universities are teaming up for joint negotiations with journal publishers. Their first target is Elsevier. My university came close to losing access to Elsevier journals as a part of this move.
I work at a small non-profit anthropological database. Our primary target is academia. We can only employ a small team of developers (2) and 12-13 total staff. About a decade ago Germany negotiated with us our only perpetual access license for all of their universities.
Consortia memberships in the US and Canada are not uncommon either. However, Germany possess our only perpetual license.
A lot of us desire open access, however, we are not sure how we would fund ourselves. Our subscription rates are generally very low. Especially compared to these large journals.
Re:open-access? Perhaps. I should note that this area is not my expertise. However, what to do when the grant runs out?
Even so most of our revenue comes from the subscription. A grant may pay for hosting, but what about the time of the developers. Or those working on the publication side. We are already on a near skeleton crew. Especially compared to what we had here in the 1940-80s.
Well, you get another. Lots of non-profits run only on grants.
Have you thought about applying for EU grants? Open Access is one of the goals on Horizon 2020, the €80B EU program[1], but even after that there's no shortage of EU cash being dumped on anything even barely related to "innovation".
That's also what the French are doing ; first paragraph of the article:
> [...] an impasse in fee negotiations between [Springer Journals] and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
They should go even further and unite between nations. If most of the universities of europe would negotiate as a consortium they would have even more power.
Of course I would prefers solutions which get rid of elsevier, springer etc...
