Green Open Access - Free for Authors But at a Cost for Readers - The Scholarly Kitchen

"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."