The potential effect of making journals free after a six month embargo :
“This report was commissioned by the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers [ALPSP] and The Publishers Association. It follows a straw-poll survey commissioned from Gold Leaf by ALPSP inMarch 2012 in order to obtain sample information on how the acquisition policies of academic libraries might be affected by an across-theboard mandate to make journals articles available free of charge six months after publication. The ALPSP survey obtained responses from thirty-four libraries worldwide. The results from this small sample suggested that such a mandate would have a significant impact on publishers’ revenues, especially in the fields of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences [AHSS] publishing. ALPSP and The Publishers Association therefore commissioned Gold Leaf to conduct a larger, more statistically significant survey, to include corporate and specialist libraries as well as academic ones, in order to obtain more robust results on what the likely impact of a six months’ embargo might be.”
URL : http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/ALPSPPApotentialresultsofsixmonthembargofv.pdf