A Little Springtime for Green Open Access? Icons for More Free Full Texts in PubMed | Absolutely Maybe

"People publish a lot in journals that don’t provide gold access, or do so only at unaffordable levels, for reasons that aren’t going away any time soon – like needing to be published in a prestigious journal for their careers, or because a publicly inaccessible journal is 'the' one that specializes in their work. For huge numbers of people, even lower cost OA options are a problem. Even embargoed green is far better than no public access at all.

IRs have become an important way for researchers’ work to get noticed and used. Google Scholar picks up and links to full texts from IRs, and that’s a big deal. So does Wikipedia. If your IR joins PubMed’s LinkOut, that’s another big step up in visibility and accessibility: a few million people use PubMed every day.

Reasons to be optimistic IRs will fill up more? Europe’s push for getting more of its research out in the open is a big one. Earlier this year I wrote that it looks likely that there will be a growth spurt in open access by 2020, thanks to Europe, led in particular by the Netherlands and Germany. Part of that will be green growth.

There are signs policies are starting to have an impact. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) provides universities’ core funding. As of 1 April 2017, the only publications that will be taken into account in assessing university productivity and excellence are open access ones: if they are not 'gold', they have to be deposited in a public repository."