It's incredible how they are down to such racketeering practices. Their journals should be stripped of rank, where's the prestige to publishing with them?
They can still publish in Elsevier journals, that's no problem. The only problem here is that starting now, Germans and Swedes will have to search with google and download from arxiv instead of from Elsevier. Well, and that Elsevier isn't getting paid.
EDIT: I forgot old papers. Lots of old papers aren't in arxiv, so Swedish/German researchers who want to reference a 1955, 1975, 1995 paper have a bit of a problem.
Won't researchers just resort to Sci-Hub/Libgen? So either Elsevier cuts fees and opens up or they don't get paid at all. So it seems the Germany and Sweden will probably win out.
I suspect those countries various open access laws will prohibit submitting state funded research in inaccessible journals.
Remember that you have to pay money to submit a paper to nature, they don't pay the peer reviewers, they charge for access to the journals, and they have ads.
Whenever Elsevier say that they add value it is imperative that you recognise that they do not pay for /anything/ that they publish, and in fact get paid by submissions (literally you pay to submit, not to publish), and you agree not to publish it anywhere else, or even just post it on your own website.
I live in one of those countries and read the long-words newspapers every day. As far as I can tell there's not even any such proposal going here.
I personally don't see it as worthwhile anyway... people are putting their papers on the university web site and on arxiv anyway, why require more? You could propose that people have to publish on some other web site. Shortly later someone founds learned journals with names like "Journal of Acquired Senescence" and starts billing the German and Swedish taxpayer for the service of publishing the PDFs that are already on the university web site and in citeseerx. What's the point for the taxpayer?
Highly depends on the subject area.
For mathematics almost 100% of new papers are on the arxiv.
However, in biology or chemistry it is not nearly as pervasive.
One reason for that, besides history and culture, is given by exceptions in journals. Most journals demand exclusive copyright and that your article is not made available elsewhere, but all math journals include an exception for arxiv. That might not be the case in other scientific fields.
