“We have reached peak subscription (Jan Velterop coined the term during an SSP panel I moderated a few years ago). I subsequently wrote a piece in the Scholarly Kitchen on this topic. What I mean by this is that library budgets are stagnant and there are no new markets left—publishers have already sold into all the major research institutes in China, India, South American, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. The Big Deal is a mature product. This means that publishers must come up with new sources of revenue. Open access (OA) is part of this equation, but the OA market has not grown as fast as many predicted. This would ordinarily lead to a spate of acquisitions, but there are not many independent publishers left other than societies, and they are not selling their publications (though they are increasingly licensing them)….”