Pre-emptive Gold Fever seems to be spreading.
Following hard on the heels of University of California's Gilded New Deal with Springer -- UC subscribes to the Springer fleet of journals for an undisclosed fee, but, as part of the Deal, UC authors get to publish their articles as Gold OA for free in those same Springer journals -- now Universities UK (UUK) and the Research Information Network (RIN) are jointly dispensing advice on the payment of Gold OA fees (which is fine) but without first giving the most important piece of advice: Universities should on no account spend a single penny on Gold OA fees until and unless they have adopted a Green OA mandate for all of their refereed journal article output. There is still time for UUK and RIN to remedy this, by prominently setting the priorities and contingencies straight. I fervently hope they will do so! (Peter Suber is expressing the very same hope, but in his characteristically gentler and less curmudgeonly way.) Stevan Harnad American Scientist Open Access Forum