Elsevier is an honorable company...

Woodcut on the Death of Julius Caesar

Sometimes you need a play to understand the times we live in.  So, I present to you an excerpt from The Death of Open Access:

ANTONY:

Friends, Scholars, Countrymen, lend me your browser's window!

I have come to bury Open Access, not to praise it.

The evil that ideas do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their dismissal;

So let it be with Open Access.  The noble Elsevier

Hath told you Open Access was ambitious;

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Open Access answer'd it.

Here, under the leave of Elsevier and the rest-

For Elsevier is an honorable company;

So are they all, all honorable companies-

Come I to speak in Open Access' funeral.

It was my friend, faithful and just to me;

But Elsevier says it was ambitious,

And Elsevier is an honorable company.

It hath brought many articles home to Rome,

Whose ransoms did the general idea-coffers fill.

Did this in Open Access seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Open Access hath wept;

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Elsevier says it was ambitious,

And Elsevier is an honorable company.

You all did see that on the Internet

I thrice presented it with kingly paywall access,

Which it did thrice refuse.  Was this ambition?

Yet Elsevier says it was ambitious,

And Elsevier is an honorable company.

I do not speak to disprove what Elsevier spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love it once, not without cause;

What cause withholds you then to mourn for it?

O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason.  Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Open Access,

And I must pause till it come back to me.