On Green Open Access and Open Access Mandates

OA will happen within about two years after the time that OA is universally mandated by institutions, and it will happen institution by institution. For the 180 or so institutions and funders that have already mandated Green OA (see ROARMAP), they already have open access for their own research output today. Now it’s time for the rest of the 3,000 top research institutions and the rest of the 10,000 institutions worldwide to mandate Green OA, and then everyone will have OA to all 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet’s 25,000 peer-reviewed journals. I cannot second-guess how long it will take for administrators to have the good sense to do what’s best for their institutions, for their researchers, for research itself and for the public that funds the research; it’s already long overdue, but they will do it, sooner or later.