In his blog The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication, Stuart Shieber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard and proponent of the mandatory institutional bibliographical repository policy at this prestigious university, asks the following question: « Do we want to maintain a status quo, which implies that we support a single economic model known for its uncontrolled inflationary spirals, or are were going to experiment with new models which might prove to be more reasonable in economic terms and more open to development ? His answer reads as follows:

The answer is simple: The only reason the uncontrolled inflation of journal subscription costs is a problem at all (and also the reason the upward spiral continues uncontrolled) is the planet’s universities’ inelastic demand and need for access to the journal articles.
Hence the solution is for universities — the universal providers of all those journal articles — to provide Open Access (free online access) to them by mandating that their peer-reviewed final drafts be deposited in their institutional repositories immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Universal OA self-archiving moots the problem of uncontrolled subscription-cost inflation by putting an end to the inelasticity of the demand: If your university cannot afford the subscription price for journal X, your users will still have access to the OA version.
There is no need for universities to try to reform journal economics directly now. What is urgently needed, universally reachable, and already long overdue is universal OA self-archiving mandates from universities. Focusing instead on reforming journal business models is simply distracting from and hence delaying the fulfillment of this pressing need.
Harvard should focus all its energy and prestige on universalizing OA self-archiving mandates rather than dissipating it superfluously on journal economics and OA funds.
Once OA self-archiving is universal, journal economics will take care of itself.

At the risk of appearing immodest, this statement echoes what I have been saying in this blog for years.
Speaking of which, I suggest that you consult the ORBi website if you haven’ t done so recently : its visual and informative evolution is well worth the visit.