Times Higher Education - How publishers feather their nests on open access to public money

DON'T BOYCOTT PUBLISHERS: MANDATE AUTHOR SELF-ARCHIVING (GREEN OPEN ACCESS) Why yet another futile, unrealistic and hence time-wasting call to boycott publishers? Authors can't and won't give up their high-quality journals because of journal price economics. But they can be mandated by their institutions and funders to deposit the final, peer-reviewed, accepted drafts of their articles in their institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication in order to make them accessible online free for all (Green Gratis Open Access, OA). How many more years are we going to spend lamenting the price of journals instead of doing something about it? And the first thing to do is to ignore the perverse recommendations of the Finch Committee Report, which was heavily lobbied by publishers to require double-paying them for OA (Gold OA) instead of strengthening the compliance mechanism for RCUK's existing Green OA mandates, adopted in 2005-2007 in response to the Gibson Committee Report. http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.8174