No, this is a discussion about institutions and funders requiring authors
to take responsibility for making their peer-reviewed research publications
accessible to all users, not just those whose institutions can afford to
subscribe to the journal in which it was published.

To accomplish, paying extra to publish in Gold OA journals is not
necessary. Most journals (and almost all the top journals) are subscription
journals. All that's necessary is to make the author's peer-reviewed final
draft free for all onlline by depositing it in the author's institutional
repository (Green OA).

If and when universally mandated Green OA makes subscriptions
unsustainable, journals will downsize to the peer review service alone and
convert to Gold OA, paid for by institutions out of their subscription
savings -- and the Green OA version will become the version of record.

Paying for Gold OA pre-emptively now, with scarce research funds, while
subscriptions are paying in full for publication, is folly: Finch Folly.

Advice: Institutions and funders should Ignore completely the
ill-conceived, publisher-biassed recommendations of the Finch Report and do
instead what is best for research, researchers, the R&D industry and the
tax-paying public that funds the research: Mandate cost-free Green OA and
then let nature take its course.

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 11:55 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:50:07 +0000
>
> Isn't this becoming a debate about whether research institutions
> should take responsibility for publishing the research done by their
> staff? This is a big shift since, historically, institutions have
> largely left responsibility for publishing to their research staff.
>
> If we accept that institutions need to take over this responsibility
> from individual staff, then we need to ask the question: will
> institutions be any good at discharging this responsibility?
>
> Another question is whether scholars will trust institutions to
> perform the kind of branding for their own output that is currently
> performed by third-party journals. Under the current system, if I
> publish an article in a prestigious journal, those who see the
> citation have pretty good reason to expect that my article is of high
> quality, because the journal publisher has no vested interest in
> advancing my career. But what if those who see the citation know that
> the publisher is also my employer?
>
> I'm not saying this is an insuperable problem, only that it's one more
> thing that would have to be considered if we want to get serious about
> moving in this direction. What it would amount to, really, is
> institutional self-publishing. Every journal would be seen as,
> essentially, a vanity press of its institution unless some kind of
> structurally rigorous discrimination were built into the system. (And
> what would be the institution's incentive for building such rigor in?)
>
> --
> Rick Anderson
> Acting Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
> University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]
>