Who Gets Left Behind in Australia’s Open Access Strategy?

I’ve been thinking about Australian’s recent Open Access (OA) deal now that the dust has settled on the recent showdown with Elsevier. After all, we’d been spending some $500 million to $1 billion per year on journal subscriptions (an eye‑watering 5–10% of our national research spend), so it feels sensible to negotiate as a national bloc. But the more you look at how the new agreements actually work, the more it feels like a massive missed opportunity. Collective bargaining makes sense as one of the few levers we have against concentrated supplier power. And it’s probably safe to assume that the new deals reduce costs (thought the numbers are all secret). It’s somewhat similar to national level bargaining over pharmaceutical prices: journal articles and drugs are both goods with no real substitutes so suppliers get to form effective mini-monopolies over them. But this approach is very much a safe option that leaves the structures that caused the whole problem in place. The problem…