Open Access in Scottish Universities

"My interview actually lasted more than half an hour, though most of what I was trying to communicate wasn’t really consistent with what the interviewers wanted. If you watch the video through, you’ll notice the editorial push towards green rather than gold OA*. I do understand this push, especially from a library’s perspective – we can and should be uploading the vast majority of our work to institutional repositories and making it open access via the green route – but I don’t think that is helps the long-term health of academic publishing.I spent a long time in my interview arguing for gold open access, but not the ‘hybrid’ gold open access offered by traditional publishers like Elsevier. (I find the current implementation of hybrid open access pretty abhorrent. It seems to me to be an utterly transparent way for the traditional publishers to milk the cow at both ends, collecting subscriptions and APCs.)  I’m not even too thrilled by the native OA publishers like Frontiers and PLoS, not because they’re bad for academic publishing (I think they are far better for the dissemination of research than the traditional publishers), but because they’re not revolutionary (though see Graham Steel’s comments below)**. Their model is pretty straightforward (or you could call it boring and expensive) – by shifting the collection of money from the back- to the front- end, they negate the need for institutional subscriptions by charging APCs in the region of $1000s. What I am excited about is the gold open access offered by some open access publishers who have thought about a publishing model for the modern era from the ground up, not by simple adaptation of printing press-era models. Publishers like PeerJ and The Winnower have done just this, and these are the sorts of gold OA publishers I hope will change the way we disseminate research...."