The enemy of the good: How specifics in publisher’s green OA policies are bogging down IR deposits of scholarly literature | Sterman | College & Research Libraries News

"Publishers increasingly allow green open access, but without any consistency in policies or embargoes. This creates an unnecessary amount of work for institutions and authors to comply with the often-changing policies across disciplines and publishers. In many author agreements, authors assign copyright to the publisher and the publisher allows the right to post preprint (pre-peer review version) or postprint (after peer review version) copies on the web. Whatever justification publishers give for their arbitrary restrictions on green open access activities, they undermine their own justification with the diversity of policies, restrictions, embargoes, and versions they impose on depositing copies of published journal articles."