copyright - Do publishers simply waive their exclusive rights without any resistance?

Assumption based upon my experience from CS: Typically, the business model of academic publishers is to archive and disseminate papers whose authors have transferred exclusive publication rights to the publisher. Sometimes, there are limited provisions such as authors being allowed to host a copy on their personal website. In general, though, the revenue of publishers is based upon providing paid access to the papers.

This is reflected by the choice authors often face upon publication:

• Transfer exclusive publication rights of the paper, pay nothing.



• Retain publication rights so as to provide open access to the paper, pay a (usually substantial) fee¹.

Now, the fee in the latter case is obviously the way publishers make up for their loss in revenue by not being able to restrict access to the paper to paying subscribers. This is discussed e.g. here and here.

Point of this question: Recently, the University of California has announced a "Presidential Open Access Policy" (other announcement, other article). In short, it sounds like all university employees are asked to transfer rights to their papers to the university prior to transferring rights to any commercial publisher. Furthermore, the announcements make it sound as if the consequence were that publishers simply do not receive exclusive publication rights and the university provides open access to the papers in addition to the publishers, all else apparently equal.

Now, to me, this raises a huge question mark and some speculation. In one question, I am asking here: How does this actually work? But to make things clearer and more explicit, I'm going to list the various facets of this big question one by one:

• To my knowledge, universities weren't the obstacle so far when it came to publishing as open access. Publishers were, because they wanted exclusive rights or a substantial fee, as described above. How is it that a university policy can change this?


• Do publishers readily provide a modified license transfer agreement because of such a policy? One that does not insist on exclusive rights? Otherwise, granting rights to the university first, and then signing an exclusive copyright transfer agreement sounds like the author is on their way to committing copyright infringement (or at least a breach of contract) themselves, rather than a witty way around the publishers' restrictions.


• Is this actually a legal loophole that allows authors to circumvent the publishers' wishes? If so, it would seem quite an obvious loophole ("Don't want to transfer exclusive rights? Easy. Just grant someone else rights before."); why isn't everyone doing it? Is the University of California administration just the first to have the idea for some reason?


• Do publishers just comply with this because the University of California is a comparably "big player" (as the press release states, "the UC system is responsible for over 2% of the world’s total research publications")? Even if so, what do publishers gain from complying? One might say they're not getting less, they're getting absolutely nothing.
  
  
  
  
  • And even if so, how would UC threaten them? Would they threaten to use only their in-house publisher, which offers free open access hosting in accordance with the policy?
    
    
    
    • Does the in-house publisher actually offer free open access hosting? It seems like UC Press relies on its sales just like commercial publishers.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • If so, would the in-house publisher offer that hosting also to non-UC employees? Otherwise, it would seem unlikely that any journal or conference would switch to that in-house publisher, hence such a boycot would amount to banning oneself from participating in research for at least some months (if not years), until the boycot has an effect.
  
  
  
  


• Is the University of California simply testing its limits here, as a part of an ongoing legal battle of varying degrees of copyright enforcement by publishers and varying degrees of copyright infringement by authors and their institutions?



• Does the policy actually mean that all university departments are obliged to pay the open access publication fee to the publishers (i.e. requests by employees to get reimbursed for such a fee cannot be dismissed)? I was told (and hence cannot provide an accessible reference) for wealthy universities like the University of California, the open access publication fees in the lower thousands of dollars per paper might be negligible (?)
  
  
  
  • The latter speculation might not apply completely. Other wealthy universities are having issues to pay for subscriptions, and in numbers, these issues seem to be well in a range where one might get by paying all those open access fees, as well. But ... is this maybe a bureaucracy thing? Library subscriptions have to be paid from some (relatively limited) permanent account, whereas open access fees would apply upon publication and can thus be paid from (possibly much more generous) research grants?
  
  
  
  


• Or of course: Am I missing anything crucial about the announcement?

¹: For instance, ACM charges (for non-members) USD 900 per conference paper and USD 1,700 per journal paper.