Battling for 'Openness'. Applying Situational Analysis to Negotiations Between Dutch Universities and Elsevier

Abstract

More than a decade after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) declaration, Open Access has become a widespread phenomenon and a dominant topic in the academic publishing world. Several large-scale developments can be currently observed including (trans-)national efforts towards ‘full Open Access’ in a given year or ‘offsetting’ models when renewing library subscriptions. In this context, the Netherlands are believed to play a pioneering role as novel agreements with major academic publishers have been recently reached and Open Access was set prominently among the priorities of the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first semester of 2016. However, the negotiations between Dutch universities and Elsevier could be rather described as an ongoing battle that only recently has taken ‘a constructive turn’. As a rich case for investigation, the controversy will be examined using Adele E. Clarke's (2005) method of situational analysis and subsequently visualized with three kinds of maps.