Open Access: The Historic Irony

Historians will look back on our planet's glacially slow transition to the optimal and inevitable outcome for refereed research dissemination in the online era -- free online access webwide -- and will point out the irony of the fact that we were so much quicker to commit scarce money to trying to reform publishing ("Gold OA") through projects like SCOAP3 and COPE than we were to commit to providing free online access ("Green OA") to our own research output (by depositing it in our institutional repositories, and mandating that it be deposited) at no extra cost at all. Yet it will turn out to have been Green OA self-archiving -- and Green OA self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders -- that actually brought us universal OA at long last, and not the limited and ineffectual "gold fever" that is freeing high energy physics (SCOAP3) -- which has already been effectively OA for almost two decades -- nor the COPE commitment on the part of universities to pay to make a small portion of their own research output Gold OA -- without first committing to make all of it Green OA, cost-free.