At present, renowned scientific journals generate their main turnover with subscription deals with university libraries.
The EU is supporting a push by the British government which would see the costs demanded by large commercial publishers such as Reed Elsevier and Nature Publishing Group demand in exchange for examination, print or online publication carried by research institutions and universities. To compensate this, the institutions’ libraries would no longer have subscribe to costly journals from the major publishing houses.

An increasing number of publishers and universities are additionally using the principle of open access. However, the open access magazines pass their administration costs on to the authors insofar as these are not paid for by a sponsor.

from Spiegel Online

For more information:
http://www.spiegel.de/ (German)
http://europa.eu/rapid/