“Make no mistake: The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC Berkeley, and co-chair of UC’s negotiation team. “Publishing our scholarship behind a paywall deprives people of the access to and benefits of publicly funded research. That is terrible for society.”

Read the full UC press release. I’ve always shared Roger Schonfeld’s doubts about the advisability of “read and publish” agreements, but I am fully on board for the general propositions UC is defending now that they’ve abandoned negotiating: Elsevier’s business model is parasitic and broken, open access is the future, and locking our research behind paywalls is self-defeating and indefensible.