I am genuinely surprised that the UC was able to get Elsevier to agree to this much, even if it does come up well short of their original list of demands [1].

I am genuinely surprised that the UC was able to get Elsevier to agree to this much, even if it does come up well short of their original list of demands [1]. I do wonder what this means for researchers, in particular there was no mention of publishing fees. Generally in hybrid journals there is a hefty price tag for open access (basically -- you are paying for the expected revenue generated by your paper...) so I could see that this means the publishing fees for a top Elsevier journal upwards of 5 figures--a price that research groups will now need to cover. I was at a talk by Nature about their Nature Photonics journal, and when asked if they would ever consider doing open access for Nature Photonics they said they have thought about it, but that it would cost them about $40,000 per paper for it to be commercially viable. Even though the peer review is free, they have a team of editors that need to get paid and they only publish 10-20 papers a month. Also -- see the previous discussion with more focus on Elsevier's side of the story at [2] [1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/rm-jn-transform-scholarly-communication-declaration-2019.pdf https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/rm-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26379954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26379954