Overselling the Importance and Urgency of CC-BY for Peer-Reviewed Scholarly and Scientific Research

“I think there has been a vast overstatement and overselling of the alleged need for and urgency of re-use rights (CC-BY) for peer reviewed research journal articles today, especially in view of the fact that CC-BY is much harder to get journal publishers to agree to and not all (perhaps not even most) authors and disciplines need or want it. Re-use rights (Libre OA), just like Gold OA, will come, after Green Gratis OA, where needed and wanted. But neither is even remotely as important or urgent as (Gratis) OA itself today: free online access to the journal articles of which 80% are accessible only to subscribers today. Green OA is the solution to providing the missing 80% of OA. All that's needed is to mandate it. But insisting now on Libre OA (further re-use rights), just like insisting now on Gold OA, is simply demanding still more, and thereby raising higher the obstacles to getting the 80% Green OA (Gratis) that is already within reach and has been for years through Green (Gratis) OA self-archiving mandates from researchers' institutions and funders... Consider that there is a practical contradiction between (1) recommending that the UK should continue to support, and indeed to expand to 100%, its Green OA mandates from its funders and institutions and (2) recommending that the UK should press harder for Libre OA. For not one of the UK's funder and institution Green OA mandates (which are what constitutes the UK's lead in OA) is a Libre OA mandate -- and with good reason: Green OA mandates are a research-community adaptation to the publisher status quo... And self-archiving of the author's refereed final draft is the research community's self-help response, within this status quo. The result is Green Gratis OA; that is the thing that the research community needs the most today -- but it only has 40% of it today in the UK, and only 20% of it worldwide. Opening up the Libre OA front, alongside the Gold OA front, instead of pushing full-speed on the all-important Green Gratis OA mandating front toward 100% Green Gratis OA is simply adding further obstacles, handicaps and distractions to the Green Gratis OA front -- as well as providing an unscalable model that most other countries will not want (or be able) to follow. And the most important thing to keep in mind is that these further obstacles, handicaps and distractions are nowhere near as important and urgent as (Green, Gratis) OA itself. (Not to mention that the fastest and surest way to get eventual Libre OA as well as Gold OA is to first mandate Green Gratis OA universally.) I think it would be practical, realistic and helpful to make it clear to all OA advocates that the primary, immediate, and already fully reachable target is 100% Green Gratis OA, and that the re-use rights and the Gold OA can and will come later, after this urgent primary goal is reached, but will only make it gratuitously harder to reach if they are needlessly insisted upon in advance.”