"The report concludes that the impact of a universal six-month open-access mandate on publishers’ revenues would be “considerable”. “Libraries would be impacted by the collapse or scaling down of academic publishing houses…Most publishers would be obliged to review their portfolios; and a substantial body of journals, especially in AHSS subjects, would cease or be financially imperilled,” it says. By contrast, the landmark Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project announced last week it had found no evidence that the self-archiving of academic papers threatened journal viability. The project, co-funded by the European Commission and overseen by a group of publishers, librarians and funders, found that self-archiving actually increased the number of times that papers, particularly those in the life sciences, were downloaded from publishers’ websites – although the reasons were unclear. The PEER findings, announced at an end-of-project conference in Brussels on May 29, also indicated that the vast majority of academics did not self-archive their work even when asked to do so."
— Times Higher Education - Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims
