Sander Dekker
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?serendipity%5Baction%5D=search&serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=Dekker&serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=%3E>,

Netherlands’ State Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Culture
and Science wants Open Access and has set some deadlines for how soon
he wants it for Netherlands. That’s fine.

But the Netherlands' Sander Dekker, like the UK's Finch

<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1099-Dutch-Echoes-of-Finch-Fools-Gold-vs.-Fair-Gold.html>

Committee, wants Gold Open Access.

That means Universities must pay Elsevier’s asking price for Gold OA.

Elsevier’s asking price is a price per article that will maintain
Elsevier's current total net subscription revenue.

Elsevier’s current total net subscription revenue is enormously
bloated — not only by huge profit margins (c. 40%) but by obsolete
product and service costs forcibly co-bundled into the price (print
edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving).

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU)

<https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/dutch-universities-urge-elsevier-editors-resign-open-access-row>

has a consortial Big Deal subscription with Elsevier, and they have
said they will continue to pay it if Netherlands authors can have Gold
OA for their articles at no extra charge.

This is basically trying to transform a bloated subscription deal into
a bloated Gold OA membership deal, rather like SCOAP3

<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/937-SCOAP3-Gold-OA-Membership-Unnecessary,-Unscalable-Unsustainable.html>
.
The reasons this transformation cannot work globally are many, but
locally it can be made to work, for a while, by fiat, if VSNU
collaborate and Elsevier agrees.

And on the surface it is not obvious why Elsevier would not agree,
since it looks as if the deal would give Elsevier exactly what it
wants: current revenue levels per Elsevier article will be maintained,
but with the Netherlands paying its share not as subscriptions but as
memberships

<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/660-OA-McMemberships,-Dismemberment-and-MC-Escher.html>,

in exchange for Gold OA for Elsevier articles by Netherlands authors.

But what about the rest of the world? They continue paying
subscriptions — not just to Elsevier, but to all other publishers. And
VSNU, too, must continue paying subscriptions to all other publishers
whose journals Netherlands users need.

Would this local Netherlands solution be stable, sustainable and scalable?

The answer is that it would be none of these -- and *Elsevier knows
that perfectly well*. And that explains why they are not eager to make
this local Gold membership deal with VSNU (even though Springer
<http://www.springeropen.com/libraries> has been trying to encourage
the consortial Gold membership model for its subscribers) -- and why
VSNU is contemplating asking Elsevier editors at Netherlands
institutions (and eventually all Elsevier authors in Netherlands) to
boycott Elsevier unless Elsevier makes this transition to Gold

A Gold consortial membership model is unstable, unsustainable and
unscalable because memberships, like subscriptions, are *locally
cancellable* -- by an institution or a country -- and because there
are other (competing) publishers in the world.

And membership would be unstable and unsustainable even if the
scalability problem could be magically surmounted by a global “flip
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/421-SCOAP3-and-the-pre-emptive-flip-model-for-Gold-OA-conversion.html>”

in which all institutions on the planet and all publishers on the
planet solemnly agree jointly to go from their current subscriptions
to Gold OA memberships for all their journals with all their
publishers at their current subscription price *all on the same day.*

The very next day the system would destabilize, with cash-strapped
institutions cancelling their “memberships” to journals that their
users needed to use but in which their authors published little,
preferring instead to pay for publishing by the piece for the few
articles they publish in them.

This would in turn destabilize the sustainability of yesterday’s
subscription revenue streams via memberships, which would mean that
membership fees would have to increase for the non-defecting
institutions to sustain all publishers' net revenue, which would in
turn mean that institutions would be paying more for memberships than
they had been paying for subscriptions.

And the Global Consortial Gold Membership Deal (which is in reality a
global producer oligopoly

<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/343616/1/PoynderVelt.pdf>

sustained by a global consumer consortium) would begin unravelling the
moment it was “flipped.”

Trying instead to get there more gradually, institution by
institution, publisher by publisher, journal by journal rather than
via a miraculous global “flip” instead destabilizes the scalability of
the Gold membership model rather than just its sustainability.
Institutions as well as publishers would be participating in a
multi-player prisoner's dilemma, with defection always being the
optimal choice.

But this also is the relevant point to recall that there is another
way to give and get OA, namely, Green OA self-archiving:

For institutions struggling with bloated, unaffordable journal
subscription prices, the far more natural route is to reduce
subscriptions to just their users' must-have journals and to mandate
Green OA for their own publication output, rather than to lock
themselves into increasingly unaffordable subscriptions in the form of
membership fees in exchange for Gold OA for their own institutional
publication output.

*This, of course, is exactly why publishers are trying so hard to
embargo Green OA*: Not because the survival of refereed journals is at
stake but in order to hold publication hostage to either current
bloated subscriptions or bloated Gold OA fees that sustain the same
net revenue either way they are paid.

That way the bloated asking price price will never go down and the
costs of the obsolete products and services can continue to be
forcibly co-bundled into the asking price.

But publishers know perfectly well that they are fighting a battle
that they will ultimately lose, and that all they are doing now is
doing whatever they can to sustain their current revenue levels as
long as possible, with the vague hope that piece-wise Gold OA fees
might continue to sustain the bloat as unstable, unscalable and
unsustainable consortial "memberships" could not.

So publishers continue conning the likes of Sander Dekker into
believing that today's bloated Fool's Gold OA is the only way to have
OA, and that Green OA would destroy journals altogether, so it must be
embargoed.

And VSNU thinks it is fighting the good fight by threatening another
embargo against Elsevier unless they agree to Fool's Gold consortial
OA membership for the Netherlands.

A stable, scalable, sustainable solution, of course, is within reach,
through a transition to affordable, unbloated Fair Gold induced by
first
universally mandating and providing Green OA (there is even an
antidote  <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/> for publishers'
embargoes on Green OA) -- but neither Sander Dekker nor VSNU are
grasping it.