“Nudging” researchers toward Gold Open Access will delay the shift to wider access of research. | Impact of Social Sciences

"Throughout its response to the BIS Select Committee, it is evident that the UK Government is not perceiving open access primarily as a means of maximizing UK research uptake and impact — for the benefit of the UK tax-payers that fund the research, and for the progress and productivity of research, in the UK and world-wide — but as a means of sustaining the current revenue streams of peer-reviewed journal publishers, come what may. That is why the Government’s 'travel' plans tend to be framed far less in terms of the real needs of UK research and researchers and far more in terms of 'business models,' 'market,' a 'mixed economy,' and how these can be 're-engineered' to keep them congruent with publishers’ terms and timetable.  There seems to be little room in the UK Government’s vision for even considering the following contingencies: that 100% OA is not only already fully feasible today, thanks to the online medium, but also urgent for research and researchers, indeed already overdue; that the online era has already made a lot of the traditional products and services of journal publishers (and their costs) obsolete; that publishers’ current revenue streams are greatly and needlessly inflated; and that the embargoes and other retardants that publishers are themselves placing in the path of OA are not, in reality, necessities, to sustain the essential functions of peer-reviewed journal publishing, as publishers claim; they are merely contrived to prop up the expensive and obsolescent functions of publishers in order to sustain publishers’ current highly inflated levels of income at all costs, come what may.  What is keeping the economy 'mixed' and slow to provide OA, in other words, is that publishers are holding OA hostage to their current revenue streams, by embargoing Green, and transitioning to Gold only on terms and on a timetable that lock in those revenue streams ..."