A useful new analysis today from COAR, “Don’t believe the hype: repositories are critical for ensuring equity, inclusion and sustainability in the transition to open access”. Recent…
publishers’ comments portray gold open access as the only ‘legitimate’ route for open access, and attempt to diminish the repository (or green) route.
According to the author, some publishers are even implying that repositories have no aggregators, or are not present in Google Search or in specialist search-engines such as Scholar and GRAFT. Laughably, they apparently suggest that poor over-worked researchers will instead…
need to search through individual repositories to find the articles.
The publishers are also said to be trying to stop all but a sub-set of elite repositories from being used for data deposit, via…
proposing to define the repository selection criteria for where their authors’ should deposit research data. These criteria, which are very narrowly conceived, threaten to exclude thousands of national and institutional repositories as options for deposit.
Again, this sounds like it is designed to make researchers feel it’s more convenient to publish their article + data via a big publisher.