The price of the Gold-APC model for open access publishing increasingly challenges both the budgets and sensibilities of researchers and their institutions. Recently, I’ve observed that some advocates of open access have retreated from the goal of “flipping the system” and instead recommend that researchers publish closed and just deposit a version of their articles in a repository or on a preprint server. Putting aside the reality that this strategy of avoiding payment for open access publishing cannot be used if one is publishing in a fully Gold-APC journal, including those that have been flipped to open access, or if the author is under a zero-embargo open access mandate that the publisher refuses without the author paying for open access, the Green open access approach not only preserves the subscription system but also imposes hidden costs on readers, prolonging the inequities that open access aims to address.
At its core, open access seeks to make the scholarly literature “free and available to anyone with internet access.” Without question, green open access fulfills this criteria. Articles may be available in institutional or disciplinary repositories, on preprint servers, scholarly networks like ResearchGate, or personal websites. In cases where the text also includes a Creative Commons license, readers gain usage rights that extend beyond those granted by traditional copyright laws. But if Green Open Access is free, why do I say that there is a cost?
The Cost to the Reader of Green Open Access
The most significant hidden cost of Green open access lies primarily in the reader’s time. Accessing Green versions often involves extra steps in search and discovery, navigating complex and unfamiliar interfaces, enduring workflow disruptions, and managing files and metadata.
Let’s start with the best case scenario – that the Green open access text is the Version of Record (a.k.a. Publisher PDF). In such a case, the reader of the Green open access text is still able to benefit from all of the affordances of the Version of Record, including editorial and peer review, compliance disclosures, copyediting, layout, and publisher metadata. The challenge is, however, finding the Green copy. Search and discovery systems very much reflect a centrality of the Version of Record. The reader who has a DOI will find that resolves to the publisher platform through the workflows that have been optimized for the efficiencies of resolving DOIs to article landing pages and/or the full-text itself. Instead, to find Green copy, the reader will need to rely on other citation information and conduct a search via one or more search engines, typically sorting through multiple results rather than a singular hit, which will probably include links to ResearchGate or other platforms that list the work but do not provide access to it. And, of course, the reader must do all this searching in the hopes of finding a Green open access copy, with no certainty that there is one that will reward their efforts.
The challenge to the reader is even greater when the Green open access text is a version other than the VoR, such as a preprint or author manuscript. The reader must do all of the same searching, endure all of the same workflow disruptions, etc., while also spending time and effort to determine what version of the article the text is and if it is an acceptable substitute for the Version of Record, and also then read without the benefit of layout and copyediting.
Because I am affiliated with a research library with very robust online collections, I myself rarely go searching for Green open access copies for myself or my library’s patrons; however, even in my minimal experience, the Green open access copy often lacks information about whether the text is the Author Accepted Manuscript or some prior text version, is missing key information for citation such as author names (which is a hint that the file is likely the pre-reviewed version), has incomplete or no ethical or compliance disclosures, is missing supplemental files such as methods appendices or data sets, and/or can be very difficult to read or even inaccessible to those with visual disabilities (e.g., a scanned image copy of a printed version of a Word document with no OCR applied).
And, if the reader is not careful to compare the findings and conclusions of such a non-Version of Record Green open access copy to the paywalled Version of Record, they may also believe that authors have demonstrated something that they have not. While research has found that there are relatively few changes between preprints and the Version of Record for the majority of articles, one does not know if that is true of the specific article one is reading without checking into version discrepancies for that particular article. Doing such a comparison will require no longer relying on the no-charge Green open access copy but also needing to secure access to the paywalled copy. The reader’s risk here is, of course somewhat remediated if the Version of Record has a publicly available abstract that usefully reports the major findings and conclusions that the reader can review. Nonetheless, checking on all of this takes time.
In addition to the time required, readers also face the opportunity cost of time that could otherwise be dedicated to their research, analysis, or other work. This barrier perpetuates inequity among readers. Those who can afford subscriptions, or who are affiliated with well-resourced institutions, are freed from the added burden of navigating the complexities and inconsistencies of Green open access. By contrast, readers without such access must invest valuable time (or the time of their lab staff) into managing the shortcomings of Green open access, including disrupted workflows, missing metadata, accessibility issues, and uncertainty about version discrepancy.
The Failure to Find Green
The reality of just how inconvenient or difficult it is to locate Green open access copy is perhaps best evidenced by the number of Tweets and the like I have seen over the years from Green open access advocates complaining that a particular article is not open access, i.e., #paywalled, when a Green open access copy is actually available. If even those who have a sophisticated understanding of the open access landscape do not think to look for Green copy, or fail in their search, how much greater is the challenge for those without this knowledge?
To illustrate the challenge, try a simple test: over a week, for every paywalled article you access, attempt to find a Green copy. Keep track of your time as well as how often you fail to find a Green copy. How easy is it for you to sort out what version of the article you have and, particularly if it is medical, how comfortable are you relying on the Green text if it is not the Version of Record? What articles would you have to do without even though you wanted to access them? (Note: It would be even better if you could set it up so that you hit the paywall rather than getting the PDF; however, if you are institutionally affiliated it is likely that it will be difficult to disconnect yourself fully from the pathways to paywalled access that have been smoothed by your library and institutional technology staff, as well as publishers, through initiatives such as SeamlessAccess and GetFTR unless you have a device that you have never ever used for any institutional tasks including email or campus courseware.)
Every Reader Deserves Gold Open Access
Ultimately, the promise of open access is equity in information access. I ask, then: doesn’t everyone deserve the simplicity and reliability of Gold Open Access?
Discussion
72 Thoughts on "Green Open Access – Free for Authors But at a Cost for Readers"
Finding green versions papers is often easier if one searches with Google Scholar, which often gives a link to a green version.
Many general readers don’t need the details of a version of record: they just want to understand the gist of the author’s argument and evidence.
And to add to the above, using the Unpaywall extension will frequently locate the green version, too (including book chapters!) I would be curious to extend the above challenge from the article: those without institutional access, are you still not finding the green version even with the Unpaywall extension? I’m not saying it is fail-safe but more often than not, Unpaywall gets me to an open access version (often green)!
https://unpaywall.org/
Thanks for adding these tips that illustrate how it takes extra time, effort, and tools to locate Green.
Extra to what? If one’s starting point is https://unpaywall.org/ finding the subscription version requires extra time and effort.
Starting from anywhere else. Ask yourself …. What’s the market share of unpaywall.org as the starting search portal? What’s even the awareness of its existence? And, of course, once you find Green, you are still more likely to encounter all the other issues I mention in the piece
Search and retrieval is just one of the ways people pay a time tax for Green.
So you are suggesting that using Google Scholar (you don’t even need to use UnPaywall), which most researchers and students do anyway, is such an inconvenience to readers that it justifies unfunded researchers to pay up to $10,000 to publish their own research in journals which they generally edit and review for largely for free? Are you funded by Elsevier or something? Good grief this is nonsense.
Thanks for asking. I am not so suggesting. And, I do not work for Elsevier. I am arguing for a world where all readers equitable access to Gold open access. That doesn’t preclude also believing we should have a world in which all authors have equitable access to publish Gold. Neither of these currently exist and both should. This is just one essay. It can’t talk about everything.
It is also probably worth reminding people that “Gold” OA does not necessarily mean APC-driven OA.
I would be hard pressed to find a person that doesn’t use Google/Google Scholar as their starting point for locating relevant articles. To such an extent that I get several reference inquiries every month for people looking for articles they found on google scholar that they can’t access, but are in fact subscribed to by the library by a service like EBSCO or ProQuest.
Also worth noting that Unpaywall and Open Access Button have browser plugins, I like unpaywall more because if I’m on a paywalled article the green unlock icon appears and seamlessly directs me to a version of the article.
I’m barely a librarian and I know that the majority of researchers use Google Scholar and other free aggregation tools over publisher sites. GS makes it *very* easy to find free to read articles. Wish it was around when I was a researcher at an African ngo with limited resources.
Any thoughts on studies like these that show poor performance in Google Scholar by institutional repositories?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-05175-0
(also note, the argumentum ad hominem in your comment above was removed as per our moderation policies https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/05/30/on-comment-moderation-or-why-has-my-manifesto-disappeared-into-the-ether/)
At present, author self-archiving is the ONLY way for an unfunded scholar (and even many funded ones) to publish an article in a flagship journal like Nature or Science and make their work open access. Even in a landscape grounded in Read and Publish Agreements, independent scholars are locked out of open access. When journals flip gold, those same scholars are locked out of publishing there entirely. Think about the implications of your arguments before you start undermining the uptake of green OA. This article peddles damaging misinformation that activel undermines the free and fair distribution of knowledge. Green OA isn’t the solution, but a diverse publishing landscape that includes author self-archiving and rights retention is the solution. We already have the tools at our disposal to make all publications OA, but we need to promote the options in front of us, rather that spreading these falsehoods.
It seems to me that the old adage: there is no free lunch holds
Why does the OA movement believe there is a free lunch when it comes to access?
I had a marvelous dinner at a great restaurant and after dessert was presented with a bill! I was outraged! After all food is a basic need!
Many of the papers to which open access is sought report research funded by the public written by an author funded by the public and refereed by experts funded by the public. Open access advocates argue that the public should have access to the paper since the public has largely funded it.
My university is funded by “the public” but that doesn’t mean every member of the public is entitled to immediate free access to all of our collections. Every member of the “public” in all of the places I’ve lived have access to some kind of interlibrary loan service, eg through their local public library, which can get them a copy of whatever articles they want to read.
It’s definitely not the case that everyone globally has access to interlibrary loan. Indeed, not even within the United States is this a universal privilege.
No, of course not. While many public universities give the public access to their libraries in person, their agreements with commercial publishers prevent them from giving the public access to their collections without paying an additional licence fee. But the public should have open and free access to all the papers written by authors of public universities.
Also it should be noted that even though state funded universities are funded by our taxes they still charge ever higher rates of tuition and fees to attend. But if my tax dollars are funding the university shouldn’t the university be free? Well no doubt its complicated. As is publishing, but OA advocates immediately dismiss one key part over and over and over again – the editorial assistant who helped you through the entire process, the managing editor who oversees the journal that gets 5000 submissions a year and all the complications that brings, the copyeditor who cleaned up the text – they like to eat and pay rent. The subscription model was fine for them and you know many (I realize not all and there were/are some real doozies) journals could be subscribed to for a reasonable price. So now a department swaps $400 to subscribe to a journal and get all the content so one paper from that department can pay $3000 to get published in perhaps the very same journal. And you know many, many people who are just trying to make a living do work for Elsevier and all the others too. You think this industry if faced with shrinking revenue is going to somehow be more equitable with that and give it all down to employees cutting their profit margin, their stock price? Come on. There will be layoffs and every author and reader will suffer from quality control, poor customer service and so on. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Yes but did you provide the ingredients yourself and then cook it, so this analogy doesn’t really work
Is there an expiration date on published science? Is all science useless 365 days after publication?
Definitely not! But, it’s also useful in the first 365!
Isn’t this a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good? Green Open Access is the only scheme that challenges the business models of both the legacy and the growing for-profit OA publishers (many of the latter being of questionable scientific merit and integrity). You can still have subscriptions and author fees (or you can do without), but all the reader needs under Green OA is for universities and other repositories to do their natural job of providing a public good library service. And you can still have Gold, Diamond and all the rest of them in parallel if you have to play the publishers’ game as well. But only Green delivers the goods without financial conflicts of interests. It will be a real worry if librarians find it difficult to perform their natural public good service for the wider scholarly and scientific community.
I don’t think the pupose of open access is challenging business models that one does or does not like. I think the goal is equitable access to information. Green falls short. Gold delivers.
Peter — I must be missing something. How does Green “challenge the business models”? Green requires that subscription journals exist, since it’s those journals that manage the peer review and acceptance on which Green relies. If the uptake of Green for a particular journal reaches the tipping point where libraries no long subscribe to that journal and it goes out of business, then Green disappears as well. Green is a parasite on the subscription model; without a healthy host, the parasite dies as well.
Green open access does not depend on subscription journals. ‘In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal’, and some physicists do not even bother to submit their paper to a peer reviewed journal.
Lisa can correct me, but I believe she’s using green in the conventional sense where the author’s final version is deposited in a repository as a substitute for the peer-reviewed, published VoR. Despite the success of the arXiv in these niche disciplines, and the various preprint servers that have arisen in their wake, this model has not made much headway outside of those fields. The color definitions are fuzzy (as evidenced in a recent discussion on the open-café) but I think when most people talk about green, they’re using it in that conventional sense.
The ‘Author’s final version’ = the postprint/Accepted version, which incorporates all changes from the peer-review process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postprint
Thanks for taking this up. I was a senior editor for a top journal with one of the legacy publishers in the 2000s, which I greatly enjoyed. But then I realised that these legacy publishers were taking a 40% margin in profit, which was suggestive of an economic eco-system which was not price competitive. Looking at it more closely I realised that there was essentially a virtual oligopoly of legacy publishers protected by incumbency and IP protection facing a fragmented consumer market – i.e. disparate universities and libraries – and a lackadaisical funder paying the bills of that consumer market. I was a senior editor at a time when we moved from paper to digital delivery, and I assumed that prices would fall. But far from it.
Then along came OA, and I thought that this would make the publishing market more price- and cost-competitive. It may have been at first, but in due course the legacy publishers cottoned onto this too, with sum “double-dipping” (i.e. non-OA and OA with author fees), and funders paying up front for gold and diamond access which essentially underpinned the current business model (although the intention was to advance OA). And on top of this we have the industrial-scale profit-maximising OA publishers such as MDPI which are flooding the system with fake work, which has also infected the legacy publishers (e.g. Hindawi purchase by Wiley).
In essence, the journal publishing market is an imperfect one, and probably always will be. But surely we should be trying to do what we can do to correct that imperfection to the extent that is possible given the rent-seeking of the dominant economic actors (i.e. the publishers, legacy and otherwise) for which we are all paying well above a commercially-defensible rate to support a system of scientific and scholarly publishing?
It is in that vein that I have supported Green OA because it is the only model that does not require financial intervention of the kind that draws vital resources away from research and other funds, and all it requires is that the scientific bodies such as universities, libraries etc just do their job of archiving knowledge products, if necessary with mandates (if you want to use your institutional affiliation on your publication you should surely be required to archive your final pre-print manuscript?).
Therefore it was with some dismay that I saw a library leader writing an authoritative piece in the Scholarly Kitchen casting doubt on Green OA, unnecessarily and unhelpfully in my view. I have always seen librarians as allies in any attempt to erode the cost escalation and rent-seeking in the publishing eco-system (after all they have to find the funds to underwrite subscriptions and other knowledge production models). This does not require undercutting the subscription – or the OA – system, but merely try to curb the excessive cost escalation and rent-seeking that are rampant in a market in which the consumers are fragmented and the funders apparently prepared to underwrite an overly expensive business model.
Peter — thanks for this. I think I mostly agree with what you say here, but to my understanding none of this “challenges the business models”. Doesn’t it leave those business models intact? Or am I still misunderstanding what you mean by “challenge”? Unless you’re suggesting that authors should only self-archive and not publish in legacy journals at all, which is a broader definition of green than I think most of the commenters here are using.
Yes I was perhaps too broad brush in using the term “challenge”! What I was suggesting is that Green OA is the only option that has a chance of “keeping the others honest” rather than merely reinforcing the dominant business model in which there is little if any pushback against a system that is weighed asymmetrically in favour of publisher margins, whether they be legacy, OA, or some combination. Truth is Green OA can sit alongside these actors and their business models, and at some point in the future some key funders like NIH, Gates, or coalitions of funders and libraries will wake up and realise that in enhancing Green OA they have a potential lever to bring prices down closer to a level they might be in a more price-competitive market (as long as quality is not compromised in the process). That’s what was so dismaying about the original intervention that started this discussion because it suggested a lack of strategic nous in the library community about what’s at stake when scarce library and research funds are at risk in an asymmetric commercial relationship.
Thank you for your reasoned comments, Peter. I feel another resource that is being overlooked here is the librarian. With guidance to navigate the complexities of Open Access publishing and Open Access reading, other than finding funding for an APC, most of the issues raised on both sides of the argument can be resolved with the assistance of a librarian prepared to share their knowledge on the best ways to deposit and discover information. This is after all part of our job description. And as a result of the above exception, I will continue to champion institutional repositories.
I’m old enough to remember pre-OA, even pre-WWW, when a researcher whose library didn’t subscribe to the journal in question had to wait a couple of weeks for the Interlibrary Loan service to deliver the article. This post reeks of whiny entitlement – how awful to have to take what, 5-10 minutes, to find the article? It takes less than 1 minute to go from a DOI to a completed ILL request at my institution, and the VoR article will typically arrive in less than 2 business days, often in mere hours. One might make a macroeconomics case for widespread gold OA for the research ecosystem, but claiming everyone “deserves” free and immediate access to the intellectual property of others is offensive.
My argument here is that if open access is concerned with equitable access to information then people deserve Gold over Green open access. I was taking the desirability of open access itself as a given. It’d be a different essay to argue for open access per se and one that many others have already written.
Some questions:
Is “equitable access” motivating the authors to pay this substantial APC under the Gold model? Or is it more about getting published in a prestigious journal?
Given the OA mandate, would a publisher agree with your assertion that although immediate free access would be available under the Green model, readers would rather pay the subscription for the ease of access to the article and the ancillary functionality?
Would Publishers be motivated to churn out more articles under Gold?
Under Gold, should APCs be regulated? Or will publishers simply shift the onus to authors, allowing them to maintain the same revenue previously earned from subscriptions and institutional licensing?
“It takes less than 1 minute to go from a DOI to a completed ILL request at my institution.” The key to privilege here is “at my institution.” What happens when you don’t *have* an institution? Or when “your” institution doesn’t provide ILL support? For example, a public school?
When we did focus groups with medical students, residents, and post-docs they made it very clear that in their workflows a 24-48 delay in retrieving the article was unacceptable.
Med contexts is a special case and there are document delivery services that can provide the VoR within minutes or faster. They cost more per article, but med-related budgets tend to be higher than a typical humanities dept so they can afford it. Look into Article Galaxy Scholar for an example of such a service. And even the Docline ILL network run by the NLM is also there – they certainly know what med people need.
“med-related budgets tend to be higher … so they can afford it”. How I wish that were true. (I’m very famliar with DOCLINE — I wrote the first DOCLINE user manual when I was a post-grad fellow at NLM in 83-84).
I understand the argument that gold is better than green. More immediate, version of record, etc. But as a librarian, when publishers keep increasing APCs and asking authors to pay for APCs in hybrid/subscription based journals, we’re often asking why we’re paying for gold when we have green. Should we even have repositories then? Should our efforts be elsewhere? My personal feelings is that the open access movement wants equitable access to information but publishers are more concerned about profits than access, and have coopted the oa movement for more green/gold/money.
I hope libraries maintain their research repositories, which are the most reliable source for theses passed by their institutions. I understand that only about a third of authors lodge the appropriate version of their publications in their institution’s repository, but where they do they are vert easy to access. Also, digital repositories’ publication data are often more comprehensive and easier to access than publishers’ publication data.
Making research visible, searchable, accessible, measurable, reliable, credible, equitable and yes, sustainable, costs money, wherever the publisher is color-coded on the OA spectrum.
Your lunch is free, enjoy, but spare some loose change for the staff in the Diamond OA kitchens.
Thanks for this Lisa. My concerns about green repositories is related to quality. While bad papers are sometimes published, the VoR can be retracted. During the pandemic, pseudo science was placed in repositories and noted by the press. Repositories are perfect for paper mill results. AI makes this worse. An academic can recognize a fake paper, an AI crawler cannot.
But surely gold open access has spawned numerous paper mills.
I really am going to need a source on these allegations. Sure, could it have happened? Yes. But as a subsequent commenter notes, malfeasance in research isn’t driven by one particular process or platform. This is essentially defamation of repositories in a way that also calls their curation by libraries into question.
The final Author’s accepted manuscript version incorporates all changes from the peer review process.
Institutional repositories meet with SEO/web search indexing standards.
Combined with robust Author Rights Retention clauses in the Copyright agreement, institutional- and funder-level policy support, and a pull away from the journal being the metric of value and a refocus on the paper itself, Green/self-archiving is an incredibly important alternative.
There are other models, but repository OA is one I am able to comment on with informed experience.
A diversity of models and options must be maintained and supported. The current profit margins for Gold/fee-based OA, and monopoly of options, is demonstrably bad for *equity of access to publishing*, and redirects funding from research to publishing, which in turn is bad for scholarly communication.
Congratulations Lisa, you have earned your clicks and attention on this post. The fact that you can’t find Tweets about GreenOA is more a reflection on enshittification than it is any evidence that the
repository model isn’t working, and demonstrates again that monopoly/market contraction in communication platforms cannot be supported.
Hear! Hear! Em. This entire article is a disgraceful example of wilful disinformation about the discoverability of accepted manuscipts!
Hi Wayne, thank you for your posts in the comments. I wanted to note that the Science family of journals uses green open access to facilitate public access for five of our journals, including Science. https://www.science.org/content/page/open-access-aaas
Absolutely true and much appreciated, Megan! Science, Nature and Lancet all have great green OA options which show that it is an important and sustainable path to open access!
At first read, I thought this post was a parody or the writer was just being provocative for sport. But, taking it at face value, what an elitist, shallow, and one-sided perspective. Troubled over readers having to make some additional clicks on the Google Scholar “other versions” link or other tools mentioned in the comments? Or perish the thought, click on the corresponding author’s email to ask for a copy and perhaps start a conversation and expand one’s network? Not one word in the post about the inequities of the author-pays model for Gold OA? Some benevolent sugar fairy will swoop in and pay the $2-5K Gold OA fees? Lisa (and many OA ideologues) seem completely uninformed or indifferent to the hardship OA fees can cause authors. In my work, the OA fees easily account for >10% of the project budget. They’re also about equivalent to the cost of sending an author to a professional conference. The OA acolytes will say, oh the institutions will pay, or some foundation, or it’s a small cost compared to the overall study cost. I suspect that is the minority. and if OA fees are in reach at all, most authors have to reduce the scope of the study to pay. Some papers are written without any budget at all – mathematics, ecological modeling, and review articles come to mind as possible examples.
But none of that is as important as gold OA and saving readers from making some extra clicks or wait a few days for a full copy?
Yes, I am troubled by inequities for readers — which is the focus of this essay. Nowhere did I say “everyone should just pay APCs.” I am also concerned about inequities for authors – which I have written and spoken about extensively (usually I’m accused of being anti-OA for those remarks so it’s new for me to be called an OA ideologue!). This piece isn’t attempting an exhaustive compilation of every thought I have about open access.
Awkward phrasing as I didn’t intend to call you an OA idealogue. But your one-sided arguments cozy up to them. I do, however, intend to call you out for making a false equivalency between the relative hardship of some extra clicking for readers versus corresponding authors having to raise thousands of dollars for Gold OA.
For us in the global south we would rather dedicate a little more of our time, which is not even that large an amount of time, to get to an accessible version of the paper than pay exorbitant and unaffordable amounts in APCs often overpriced in dollars and pounds in this current unfavourable exchange rate environment.
Secondly, a CrossRef minted DOI is just one type of a persistent identifier, DSpace repositories also generate persistent identifiers such as the DSpace handle which also direct researchers directly to the paper metadata page of the paper in the repository. There is nothing exclusively particularly special about it.
Lastly, supporting science submitted as part of pre-print or the author manuscript for publication/scholarly communication does not or should not change depending on whether it is communicated in a version of record or in a preprint. The science remains the science.
What do you suggest, Lisa? Do you want green OA to be abolished? Then nobody outside the wealthy institutions, like yours, could ever read a significant proportion of scholarly content. Most institutions don’t have the luxury of access to the world’s subscription content. Critiquing green OA does not seem very encouraging to the thousands of institutional repository staff who spend a time gathering and curating that content.
As your commentators point out, tools such as Unpaywall, and the CORE Discovery browser extension (disclosure: I work with CORE), can all find freely available versions of the full text of articles where they exist. You don’t have to hunt for them.
For every article to be available via Gold Open Access is totally unrealistic. One librarian at a major US research university told me that converting all their new articles to Gold would require the library to use its entire research budget, let alone the library acquisition budget. It’s never going to happen.
Interesting, I don’t see an all Gold OA world as unrealistic. I see it as one worth working toward.
From my perspective as the journals director at a UP, Green OA seems like a sensible model. I realize posting an AAM may be not be an ideal solution, but it’s something. (The perfect really can be the enemy of the good.) It works in a variety of disciplines and helps non-commercial UPs maintain revenues. Gold OA, platinum OA, and even S2O won’t work for every journal, and with all of these OA models, commercial publishers have an advantage because they have the scale to drive down costs, have the resources to maintain read-and-publish deals, etc.
Agree entirely. Self-archiving provides an opportunity for presses to be financially viable and provides free and fair access to research at no cost to authors or readers (apart from the vexatious non-arguments in this piece). Moreover, it creates a shared, publicly-owned resource in the form of institutional repositories. It isn’t the only solution, but it is part of a diverse approach to the issue of equitable access!
Thanx for this perspective. Particularly research intensive universities might consider investing some of their research dissemination funds in their university presses to establish diamond open access monographs and journals. Some already do, but there is considerable scope for expansion.
Considering the number of comments, this provocative post has reached its aims. The problem is that it is not based on actual experiences of how researches get to their literature, but on a very limited “on my own librarian experience” as the author admits.
There are many ways through which people get to read content, their degree of interest in metadata or version varies a lot, not to mention legal contexts that make embargoes illegal or facilitate the access to “non publisher” versions. As an example, if you are in high-energy physics, you just follow a given flow on ArXiv; because the VoR/Gold Open Access version paid by SCOAP3 will simply be available much later (see https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08539, yes this is a preprint version)
And we all know the easiest way to get a paper (two clicks) is to use black open access, rather than determining first what is the publisher, get on its platform through a library, get traced to finally access content.
As an alternative to GS, for legally accessible literature and to easily get the metadta on Zotero, use Matilda https://matilda.science/?l=en
Looking at the comments on this post, it’s interesting how focused they are on the discoverability issue, rather than the many other issues raised by the author. No one has really discussed whether it’s okay for the more advantaged members of the research community to have access to “better” versions of papers, those that have been through significant levels of review (e.g., in the humanities, editorial review and revisions take place after acceptance), the addition of things like infographics and visual abstracts, and the other increasing number of enhancements made to the version of record.
I’m also seeing a bit of the same mindset we saw back in 2013, when Rick Anderson was told that he was forbidden to discuss any of the potential problems with Green OA because it might hurt the cause (https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/09/26/when-it-comes-to-green-oa-nice-guys-finish-last/). It is okay to raise questions and point out flaws in different communications models, that’s how we improve them or find better models.
Rick’s point at the time, which many here seem unwilling to acknowledge, is that Green OA cannibalizes the subscription journals upon which it relies (discussed again here in 2017 https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/02/21/forbidden-forecast-thinking-open-access-library-subscriptions/). So far, policies which allow for a reasonable embargo period don’t seem to have done substantial harm to subscriptions, although they probably play some role in the many ongoing cancellations we’ve seen in recent years (https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/). It is unclear whether immediate Green OA access to those accepted manuscripts will be similarly benign, but as far as I can tell, only a few publishers are willing to take that risk and allow it without payment of an author fee.
As for the discoverability questions, this recent paper might be of interest:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-024-05175-0
According to the study, papers in institutional repositories are not as visible as those elsewhere, due to a lack of investment in metadata and search engine optimization by those repositories.
“… policies which allow for a reasonable embargo period don’t seem to have done substantial harm to subscriptions.” SK initially had a lot to say about the U.S. Office of Science, Technology, and Policy’s 2022 decree that research that received federal funding be made freely available without any embargo. Green OA was the argument that the policy would have minimal economic economic harm, if I recall. Publishers and societies cried foul, but I haven’t heard much lately if institutions are enforcing the no-embargo, repository policy. So having the Green repository OA versions being less desirable than the publishers VOR, seemed a reasonable compromise. Be interesting to hear updated perspectives on the effects of the OSTP give-it-away for free decree.
As far as I know, the OSTP policy has not gone into effect (deadline is January 1, 2026). A few agencies announced plans to start earlier in 2025. But with a new administration coming in, it is unclear if any Biden administration policies (especially those framed around the concept of “equity”) will survive.
I agree with Lisa that the tools for depositing and retrieving manuscripts (peer-reviewed / accepted / final) are insufficient. However, this limitation reflects a Green OA model with a 6-12 month embargo on access.
The tools, however, will improve significantly once these types of manuscripts are made available immediately (as per the mandate).
Interesting. Why will that happen if it isn’t happening now?
As a vendor, I have more incentive to build discovery tools around repositories when articles are available at publication rather than a year later. IMHO, there will be a significant increase in demand for these services once the embargo is lifted.
I recognize that Green OA will be disruptive to subscription journals in this context.
David — thanks. I’m skeptical, but I hope you’re right.
Thats fair. Honestly, if ease of access were the only concern, then sure, Gold OA would have the advantage.
Sadly misinformed. Actually, the so-called “discovery problem” of articles referred to in this blog has very little to do with whether an article is in a repository or a journal, but is related to the highly distributed nature of scholarly communications. This distribution (which includes many local repositories and journals) makes discovery more challenging, but is absolutely critical to support sharing of research outputs across many countries, domains, and languages.
See COAR’s full response: https://coar-repositories.org/news-updates/in-defense-of-repositories/
Is it hard to use Unpaywall or Google Scholar? Not really. But is anyone using the accepted manuscripts in my institutional repository? Also… not really.
As a researcher, I have spent hours archiving AAMs for a few dozen IR views (which may just be web crawlers for all I know). I would be surprised if I got any additional citations given that the publisher site will record 10x more views than Green. I know librarians will say their repository stats are great – and they are – until you compare them to usage at publishers.
So I think everyone on this thread is ‘right’ in their own way (I also hate APCs), but born free OA is definitely the simplest for me as a reader and author.
I suggest you read COAR’s response to this blog post by Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR : In defence of repositories https://coar-repositories.org/news-updates/in-defense-of-repositories/
Only slightly off topic, I have found that librarians are not great at self-archiving their research. My institution does not maintain many subscriptions to LIS journals and when I have done literature reviews for my own articles they rely almost entirely on ILL because of the dearth of green OA LIS literature. It would be interesting to compare the rates of repository usage across disciplines.
What about https://base-search.net as a starting point for green OA search? This search engine has been around here since over 20 years and I guess information specialists (at least) should be aware of this tool.
I seriously doubt anyone who has actually worked in publishing or has edited a journal, and who has seen the state manuscripts are often in when they arrive from authors, would think Green OA has any value at all. The work of copy-editors and typesetters is extremely valuable and should not be denigrated, as it is by proponents of Green OA. Green is a useful way to get around ill thought-through government/funder OA mandates, and helps publishers to maintain income that pays the wages of essential staff, but it is useless to scholarship.
