Strategic Thinking Exercise — Who Is Positioned to Keep Gold Open Access Growing? | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... In this light, a question has been dogging the strategic thinking part of my brain recently — basically, who is going to keep Gold open access (OA) growing? Gold OA has grown rapidly over the past few years for a variety of reasons, and has been embraced by numerous traditional publishing houses, with hybrid experiments, new Gold OA journals, and new mega-journals all coming about. PLOS ONE, the Mother of all Gold OA mega-journals, continues to grow, and has achieved a market dominance once reserved for caricatures of Elsevier. But the OA environment has been shifting of late in ways that may make immediate Gold OA less valuable or urgent. The change is around embargoes and, more particularly, the way the US OSTP Memorandum put the world’s largest science funding body squarely behind them — as if the NIH policies hadn’t been enough. Embargoes are becoming a widely accepted and generally cost-free alternative path to achieving sufficient OA. With the US government making embargoed OA the de facto standard for the world’s largest scientific funding body, a major gravitational force is realigning orbits. Now, the OA business environment seems tilted toward a future of delayed Green OA. This has many virtues for funders, governments, and authors, and provides all involved with a viable, familiar path away from Gold OA ..."