Losing UC as a subscriber is a huge own goal for Elsevier. Researchers will get used to: 1. always posting preprints, 2. always looking for preprints first, 3. using scihub to get older papers, 4. citing and sharing material using links to preprints or scihub by default.

They will spread these habits to their students and colleagues and as they move between institutions. UC is huge across all the constituent colleges and many parts of it are extremely prestigious, so UC grad students are the sort of people who will often end up as professors in other institutions.

Researchers around the world are already used to (3) and (4). I would guess also (2) but maybe that depends on age and location, and anyway I can't say for sure. We're definitely not there yet when it comes to (1), so - if you're an academic, please make sure to pre-publish all of your research so greedy corporations don't get their grubby IP hands on them.

The wind is blowing towards gold open access, i.e., the research remains published at Elsevier, it is open-access, but publishing each article costs $1000-$2000 charged to the university via grant money or "subscriptions to publish" in place of the existing subscriptions to read.

I don't think Elsevier is really worried. This gold OA model is just sending the same quantities of money to them, just under a different name, and with the side benefit that everyone can read the published articles.

The real change will be when researchers stop publishing in the journals that they own -- noting that the costs to publish are so high because the prestige of journals means that fair competition can't happen. Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step -- or even to stop reviewing for these journals for free (see our pledge in this sense, https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/)

> Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step

The incentives are misaligned for that to happen. Who publishes the most? Postdocs, assistant professors, and their grad students. Who has the most to lose from not publishing in top journals? See above.

Curious, what were some of the demands?

The main one was automatic open access on articles written by authors from our institutions with cc license. Better prices and permanent access to some parts of their portfolio was also accepted.