[The title of this post is an allusion to Matt’s older post Authors versus publishers.] Following on from yesterday’s rant, I’m moved to write this one by Stephen Curry’s report on the latest Finch Committee meeting.

I just read this in a Times Higher Eduction report on David Willetts’s recent speech: Oh, so publishers “will not accept” Green OA? Where the hell do they get the arrogance to assume that a funding body needs their permission to say how their money is going to be spent?

The speed that things are happening at the moment is astonishing. Whenever we talk about the economics of open access — when I argue that it costs the community eight times as much to publish a paywalled article with Elsevier as it does to publish it as open access with PLoS ONE — I always hear the same argument in response.  And it’s a good argument.

These are worrying days for barrier-based publishers.  In the few days since I posted part 2 of this series, we have yet another major development in the Open Access world: UK Science Minister David Willetts’ announcement that “we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers”.

It seems the world is conveniently arranging itself for the benefit of this occasional series.  Every time I am about to post an installment, something apposite happens out there.  Just as I was preparing part 0, Bernstein Research’s investment report Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? came out; just before part 1, Elsevier decided that the solution to their problems was to hire a PR guy;

This arrived in my inbox last week, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it until now. Not surprisingly, I have comments. First, this is huge news. I am certain that Taylor &

Harvard University is probably the single richest school on the planet. Its endowment in 2011 was the biggest in the USA, at $31.728 billion — over 60% more than the next highest (Yale, at $19.374 billion). It’s also in with a good shout as the best university in the world — the current Times Higher Education ranking has it equal second, behind only Cal Tech, level with Stanford, and ahead of Oxford, Princeton and Cambridge.

Last time we looked at the state Elsevier has got itself into, and how it needs to make significant changes to regain the trust of researchers (and librarians for that matter). By coincidence, literally as I was writing that, Elsevier’s Liz Smith tweeted: I clicked through and looked at the advert: This is worth doing — as Richard Poynder pointed out back in January, Elsevier needs to get out more, and hiring someone whose job is just that

Background Today has seen the release of a Bernstein Research investment report by Claudio Aspesi, entitled Reed Elsevier: Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? It contains some stark warnings to potential investors: And: And most importantly, this conclusion: I’m not here to gloat.

A few weeks ago, I noted that the new journal Biology Open , which had just published its very first issue, had made the unfortunate choice to use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.