The Added Value of Providing Free Access to Paid-Up Content

The value of peer-reviewed publication is already very explicitly enshrined in the fact that OA's specific target content is peer-reviewed content. What OA is equally explicitly seeking -- now that the advent of the online era has at last made it possible -- is free (online) access to that valued content, so it is no longer accessible only to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published, but to all would-be users, web-wide, in order to maximize research usage, impact and progress. The cost of the portion of that value that is added by publishers is being paid in full by institutional subscriptions today. Hence what is missing is not a recognition of that value, but open access to that valued content. That is why it is so urgent and important that each institution should first adopt a Green OA self-archiving mandate -- to make its own valued content openly accessible to all users web-wide and not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journals in which that content appears. This institutional self-help thereby also encourages reciprocal mandates by other institutions, to open the access to their own content as well. Having thus seen to it that all its own peer-reviewed output is made (Green) OA, an institution is of course free to spend any spare cash it may have on paying for Gold OA publication, over and above what it already spends on subscriptions. But an institution's committing pre-emptively to Gold OA funding compacts like COPE before or instead of mandating Green OA self-archiving is not only a waste of a lot of scarce money in exchange for very little OA value: it is also a failure to add OA value to all of the institution's research output at no extra cost (by mandating Green OA self-archiving).