Politics vs Technology: the Twists and Turns of Open Access

Abstract

When funders mandate immediate institutional repository deposit, this in turn recruits institutions to monitor and ensure timely compliance (and to adopt complementary institutional immediate-deposit mandates of their own).
Authors must do the deposit, not publishers: funder requirements bind fundees, not publishers, who have a conflict of interest with mandate compliance.
The 40% of publishers who embargo Green OA are attempting to hold OA hostage to sustaining their current inflated revenue levels, whether via subscriptions or via (pre-Green) “Fool’s Gold” (over-priced, double-paid, and, if hybrid, double-dipped).
The immediate-deposit mandate + the Button maximize mandate compliance and minimize access delay and research impact loss as a result of publisher embargoes on Green OA.
Immediate deposit and Green OA leave intact both the author’s freedom of journal choice and the author’s freedom to decide whether or not to pay for Gold.
When immediate-deposit mandates have been adopted by institutions and funders globally, embargoes will become unsustainable, and Green OA will reach 100%
100% Green OA will in turn make subscriptions unsustainable, so post-Green peer-reviewed journal publishing will be able to cut obsolete costs (print edition, online edition, access-provision, archiving, now all provided by Green OA repositories) and downsize to just providing peer-review alone, at a much-reduced Fair-Gold price, paid by authors’ institutions out of a fraction of their windfall subscription cancellation savings.
Post-Green Fair-Gold OA publication will be affordable and sustainable, with all the re-use and license rights that users need and authors wish to provide.
But none of this will happen until and unless optimized, harmonized immediate-deposit mandates are adopted by funders and institutions worldwide.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Stevan Harnad: orcid.org/0000-0001-6153-1129

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