Priorities

It's too quick to see my relentless insistence on the priority of Green OA self-archiving by authors as monomaniacal!

The reasoning is this (and it's partly practical, partly ethical):

An AAA publications manager would be perfectly entitled and justified to say:

"If authors who purport to care so much about OA to their work do not even bother to provide OA by self-archiving it -- despite the fact that AAA has given them the green light to do so -- and their institutions and funders don't even bother to mandate it, then why on earth is the finger being pointed at AAA at all (and why should we regard their cares as credible)? Is AAA supposed to be the one to sacrifice its revenues to provide something that its authors don't even care about enough to sacrifice a few keystrokes to provide for themselves?"

As long as we keep focussing on where the key to providing OA isn't (i.e., the publisher-lamp-post) our research will remain in the dark.

We have to get the priorities straight. It is not enough to be ideologically "for" Green OA self-archiving and Green OA self-archiving mandates. It is not even enough to do the keystrokes to self-archive one's own work (though that's a good start, and I wonder how many OA advocates are actually doing it? the global rate hovers at about 5-20%). One has to make sure that one's own institution adopts a Green OA mandate. Then, and only then, can one go on to the next step, which is to try to persuade one's publisher to go Gold (though persuading one's funder to mandate Green would probably help more; Gold OA will come of its own accord, once we have universal Green OA).

But perhaps the most egregious misconstrual of OA priorities is not authors impugning their publisher for not going Gold before they and their institutions (and funders) go Green. That dubious distinction is reserved for institutions (and funders) who commit pre-emptively to funding Gold without first mandating Green!

PS No need for yet another central repository either! Institutional repositories are enough. Fill them. Mandate filling them. And central collections can then be harvested from them to your hearts' content. Fussing about central collections, like fussing about publishers going Gold, or about finding funds to pay for Gold (or, for that matter, fussing about copyright reform, peer review reform, publishing reform or preservation) are all all an idle waste of time, energy and attention when institutional repositories are still gapingly empty and authors' fingers are still idle...