Open Access Archivangelism

It is definitely a canard that all, most or even the majority of OA is Gold OA.

It is also definitely untrue that all, most or even the majority of Gold OA is APC-based (Article Processing Charge).

But I think it is also true that the majority of non-APC-based Gold OA journals are not among the top journals in most fields -- the ones most institutions need to subscribe to, and the ones that also tend to be the journals indexed by ISI (and that doesn't just mean preoccupation with journal impact factors: those are also the journals that have established a track-record for high quality peer review standards).

I may be wrong, but I think it is misleading to equate the canard about OA being Gold OA with the misimpression that most Gold OA is APC-based: It's not, but there's more to it than that.

And I also think that although it's true that today's limited and patchy Green OA has not caused journal cancelations, once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will go on to make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs. And that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of a portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA.

That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price). But I do not believe that either parallel subscription income, alongside universal Green -- or subsidies, or (as some imagine) pure voluntarism and thin air -- will be sustainable ways of paying for the much-reduced but still non-zero cost, per paper submitted, of post-Green peer-reviewed journal publishing.

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"If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not in an OA world... At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA – with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost." [emphasis added]

Houghton, John W. & Swan, Alma (2013) Planting the green seeds for a golden harvest: Comments and clarifications on “Going for Gold” D-Lib Magazine 19(1/2)

Unilateral Gold is the losing choice in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. If an institution, funder or country unilaterally mandates Gold OA Publishing (with author publication charges) today, instead of first (effectively) mandating Green OA self-archiving (at no added cost) then that institution/funder/country has made the losing choice in a non-forced-choice Prisoner's Dilemma (see below):

	Unilateral Green (rest of world):	Unilateral Gold (rest of world):
Unilateral Green:	win/win	win/lose
Unilateral Gold:	lose/win	win/win