By ALEX BARKER AND PATRICIA NILSSON

"A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20bn academic publishing market and Elsevier, its main operator, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians. When Florida State University cancelled its "big deal" contract for Elsevier's 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher said the library would pay $lm extra in pay-per-view fees. But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU's librar)', the charges after eight months were less than $20,000. "Elsevier has not come back to us about 'the big deal'," she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed. Librarians such as Ms Etschmaier are in a minority but are one of a host of pressures hearing down on the subscription business of the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including The Lancet, the oldest medicai journal. Elsevier is facing a profound shift in the way it does business as customers reject traditional charging structures.

Open access publishing — the move to break down paywalls and make scientific research free to read — is upending the funding model for journals, at the behest of regulators and some big research funders, while online tools and Sci-Hub, the pirate site, take readers".

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