Peter Suber has published "California against Nature" in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
Here's an excerpt:
* If publishers have been accelerating into a brick wall for decades, and libraries have been warning about the inevitable collision for decades, then why hasn't there been a collision before now?
There are two answers. First, many collisions have already occurred, even if they came and went without the same media attention. Universities have been canceling titles by the hundreds—and in the case of big-deal cancellations, by the thousands—for years. Even when collisions are incremental and cumulative rather than sudden and explosive, they have the same finality. And they have the same catastrophic effect on access to the portion of new research that is metered out to paying customers.
Second, when universities renewed more titles than they could realistically afford, it's not because found previously undiscovered or undisclosed pots of money. It's because they made painful cuts in order to find the money. Most of these cuts came from their book budgets, extending a serials crisis in the sciences to a monograph crisis in the humanities. The long series of small collisions is a measure of the pain universities have endured to postpone a wider and larger one.
At some point there really isn't any money left, or the money can only be found through cuts more painful than journal cancellations. After several decades of hyperinflationary price increases, followed by a severe recession, continuing business as usual will bring a critical mass of universities to that critical point. Publishers aren't just witnesses to this impending crunch. Those that continue to charge hyperinflationary price increases are accelerating it. Those that won't survive the resulting shake-out, even if their own prices had been moderate and affordable, will be co-victims with researchers and research institutions.
