Following a decision by the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), the Library of the ETH Zurich has disclosed its payments to Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. In his recommendation (PDF), the Commissioner concludes that the principle of public access to official records that applies at federal level in Switzerland cannot be rendered ineffective by a contractual agreement on confidentiality between the Library and the publisher. The figures, which have now been made public for the first time, reveal that in recent years the ETH Library has massively increased its expenditure on subscriptions to journals published by Elsevier and Wiley. Moreover, the figures show that, in the case of a conversion to a predominantly APC-funded publication system, the ETH Zurich, as a research-intensive university, could make savings on expenditure accruing to the three publishers - even calculating on the basis of the possibly excessive hybrid APCs.
Further information can be found here.