Why Green OA Needs To Come Before Gold OA: A Reply to Jan Velterop

Green vs. Gold is not a question of rivalry, it's a question of priority. The reason Green has to come first is very simple: (i) Gold OA journal publishing is vastly over-priced today and (ii) the money to pay for it (even once it has been downsized to a fair, affordable price) is still locked into institutional journal subscriptions. Besides providing 100% OA, Green OA (which is now only 25% when unmandated, but can be increased to 100% when mandated) provides the way both to release the subscription money to pay for Gold OA and to force journals to downsize to a fair, affordable, sustainable price for Gold OA (namely, the price of managing peer review alone, as a per-review (sic) service: no more print edition; no more online edition; all access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories): Institutions can only cancel subscriptions when the subscribed content is available as Green OA. Until then they can only double-pay (whether for hybrid subscription/Gold journals or for subscription journals plus Gold journals). And publishers will not unbundle and cut costs to the minimum (peer review service alone, nothing else) until cancellations force them to do so… [cont'd]