Elsevier's Elephant in the Room

By some measures, the medical publishing world has met the advent of the Internet with a shrug, sticking to its time-honored revenue model of charging high subscription fees for specialized journals that often attract few, if any, advertisements.

But now Reed Elsevier, which publishes more than 400 medical and scientific journals, is trying an experiment that stands this model on its head. Over the weekend it introduced a Web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 of its own pricey medical journals and that plans to sell advertisements against the content.

Well, imagine that. Strange, that the NYT doesn't even mention open access in this context. I suppose they considered it, but decided that it couldn't possibly be that my old employer Reed Elsevier is desperately trying to find a way to fight back against that tricky open stuff....