The Dutch universities’ association VSNU and publishing house Reed Elsevier are embroiled in a dispute about free access to academic articles.

The universities want to move to an open access system for academic articles, in line with education ministry policy. Some publishers, the VSNU said in a statement, are reluctant to do this because of the impact on their earnings.

The official government line is that by 2020, all academic publications should be open access because they are mainly financed with public money.

Elsevier is one of the biggest publishers of scientific journals and academic databases in the world. A spokesman for the company told the NRC that the company supports open access and that it already has more than 100 open access titles.