The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition

Citation: Stevan Harnad (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition
Download: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/265753/
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Summary

Claims that green (self/institutional archiving) Open Access will leverage a transition to gold (publisher) OA. As more articles are green OA, there will be pressure on subscriptions, cuts and downward prices from publishers, taking time to find true value of publisher services and thus gold OA costs. But green relatively non-threatening to publishers relative to conversion of entire journals to gold OA, which invites subscription cancellation. Argues against embargoes, even shrinking ones, as "too little, too late, for the very purpose of open access, which is to accelerate and augment research progress and productivity."

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Author may have updated views about publisher preference for green, see http://poynder.blogspot.com.ar/2014/06/the-subversive-proposal-at-20.html and http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1107-The-Only-Way-to-Make-Inflated-Subscriptions-Unsustainable-Mandate-Green-OA.html