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Correction for defective "Click here" URL below. It should be: http://tinyurl.com/dkgbtq On 25-Apr-09, at 12:00 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote: On 25-Apr-09, at 9:48 AM, David Prosser wrote: Interestingly, the main objection against the policy as reported was: "Open access will kill the journals you need during your career," women's studies professor and university senator Claire Moses said. "It's as simple as that." That is not a gold/green OA misunderstanding. That?s just a misunderstanding. It is not clear to me that this would have been cleared-up if the Maryland resolution had removed all mention of journals ? some academics fear that green OA will destroy journals. (David, I am assuming that what you meant was "all mention of Gold OA journals" rather than "all mention of journals," because it is impossible to formulate a Green OA self-archiving mandate at all without mentioning that it is refereed journal articles that need to be self-archived!) But, yes, my reply is this: In formulating a Green OA self-archiving mandate, the requirement itself should be stated clearly, distinctly, and independently of any ancillary, speculative or other detail: (1) Publish your articles in whatever refereed journal you wish. (2) Deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft in your institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. That's the core policy. If it is decided that access embargoes are permitted, add: (3) Most journals already endorse making the deposited article Open Access immediately. For articles published in journals that do not yet endorse immediately setting access as Open Acces, you may set access to the deposit as "Closed Access" for an embargo period of XX months (specify). (4) During the embargo period, the repository's semi-automatic "email eprint request" button will allow all would-be users who reach the metadata for your Closed Access article and need the full text to insert their email address and the reason for their request. One click from the requester forwards the request automatically to the author, who can, if he wishes, authorize the automatic emailing of one individual eprint to the requester for research purposes, again with one click. The mandate can be accompanied by a FAQ, which can answer authors' questions about such things as "will this kill journals". The answer is definitely not: "No, because we are making research money available to pay for the publishing fees of fee-based Gold OA journals." The correct answer is: All evidence to date is that self-archiving does not generate journal cancelations. Self-archiving and self-archiving mandates do not affect individual journals separately: they affect all journals at once. If and when self-archiving ever generates enough journal cancelations to make the subscription-fee model no longer sustainable for cost-recovery, journals will convert to the Gold OA publication-fee model for cost-recovery, and the money used to pay for it will be the institutional windfall savings from the very same institutional subscription cancellations that generated the conversion to Gold OA. About one-sixth of journals are already Gold OA, though only a minority of them as yet charge for publication because they are still being sustained by subscriptions or subsidies. That is all that need be said about Gold OA at this time. I know that some feel that all the world?s ills can be layed at the door of gold OA, but this really doesn?t look like a case of so-called ?gold fever?. Not all the world's ills, David, but a goodly portion of the world's delay in achieving OA. Click here to see some of the many other instances of gold fever that have been and are still slowing the progress of Green OA (hence OA). Stevan Harnad