Leo Waaijers' "Non-Proprietary Peer Review" Proposal

Leo Waaijers suggests in Ariadne that funder OA mandates impose "unfair conditions" on authors because there are not enough Gold OA journals to publish in. So instead, funders should fund research on alternative "non-proprietary peer review" services. This is based on a misunderstanding of OA mandates (which are for author self-archiving of the final peer-reviewed drafts of articles published in peer-reviewed non-OA journals, i.e., Green OA, not Gold OA) as well as a misunderstanding of peer review, which needs to be neither reformed, replaced nor redirected: existing peer-reviewed articles need merely to be self-archived.