Against Squandering Scarce Library Funds on Pre-Emptive Gold OA Without First Mandating Green OA

It is beyond my powers of comprehension to fathom why Cornell University would want to throw $50K of scarce library funds at funding Gold OA publication (for at most 1% of Cornell's annual journal article output) without first mandating Green OA (for the remaining 99% of Cornell's annual journal article output) at no cost at all.

Yes, $50K is a pittance compared to Cornell's $18M library budget (of which about half is for journal subscriptions, based on ARL statistics for 2006). But wasn't this supposed to be about providing OA to Cornell's research output?

If and when all of Cornell's annual journal article output -- about 7.5K articles per year, according to Web of Science -- is made Green OA by a self-archiving mandate, and all other universities do likewise, the planet will have 100% Green OA to all journal articles. If and when the availability of universal green OA induces institutions to cancel all their journal subscriptions, then Cornell's $9M annual windfall cancellation savings will be more than enough to pay the peer review costs for Gold OA for its annual 7.5K articles. Paying a much higher price per article pre-emptively now, when the relevant funds are still tied up in subscriptions, while not even providing Green OA to 100% of Cornell's own research output, is a real head-shaker.

The only advice I can give is that if Cornell as a whole cannot yet achieve consensus on adopting a university-wide Green OA mandate -- as MIT and other universities have done -- then the wiser of Cornell's Colleges, Schools and Departments could just go ahead and adopt "patchwork mandates" of their own (as Arthur Sale already recommended, presciently, in 2006, and as subsets of Harvard, Stanford, and other universities have recently done).

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum

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