Stevan Harnad, Open Access: "Plan S" Needs to Drop "Option B"

"To combine Peter Suber's <https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PeterSuber/posts/iGEFpdYY9dr>post with George Monbiot <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research?CMP=share_btn_fb>'s: The only true cost (and service) provided by peer-reviewed research journal publishers is the management and umpiring of peer review, and this costs an order of magnitude less that the publishers extortionate fees and profits today.

The researchers and peer-reviewers conduct and report the research as well as the peer reviewing for free (or rather, funded by their institutions and research grants, which are, in turn, funded mostly by tax-payers).

Peer-reviewed research journal publishers are making among the biggest profit margins on the planet through almost 100% pure parasitism.

Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub>is one woman's noble attempt to fix this.

But the culprits for the prohibitive pay-walling are not just the publishers: They are also the researchers, their institutions and their research grant funders -- for not requiring all peer-reviewed research to be made Open Access (OA) immediately upon acceptance for publication through researcher self-archiving intheir own institutional open access repositories....

Instead the OA policy of the EC ("Plan S <https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/moedas/announcements/plan-s-and-coalition-s-accelerating-transition-full-and-immediate-open-access-scientific_en>") and other institutional and funder OA policies worldwide are allowing
publishers to continue their parasitism by offering researcher' the choice between Option A (self-archiving their published research) or Option B (paying to publish it in an OA journal where publishers simply name their price and the parasitism continues in another key)....

The only thing that is and has been sustaining the paywalls on research has been publishers' lobbying of governments on funder OA policy and their manipulation of institutional OA policy with "Big Deals" on extortionate library licensing fees to ensure that OA policies always include Option B.

The solution is ever so simple: OA policies must drop Option B."