RE: Russia and Turkey Register Green OA Self-Archiving Mandates in ROARMAP

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> I don't see any reason for embargos for posting accepted articles
> on institutional repositories.

But there's the problem -- accepted by whom?  A journal?  The problem
with immediately making the accepted version freely available to the
public is that doing so tends to undermine the ability of a journal to
sell access to it.  On a superficial level this may sound like a good
thing (free being usually preferable to costly), but look deeper and you
find problems -- notably, the fact that journal revenue often supports
societies who support research and other scholarly activities.
Undermine the ability of societies to sell content, and you undermine
their ability to do anything else.

Is the trade-off ever worth it?  Probably.  But not always.  (This is
the problem with legal mandates, which would make it impossible to
discriminate between situations where the trade-off is worth it and
where it isn't.)

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 682-5664
rickand@unr.edu