Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

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Green OA is just as meaningless as—-or worse than—-Gold OA. You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint, and they still paywall it. The vast majority of people will find the paywalled version before yours, and anyway there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF. Especially when performing systematic literature reviews where you need to document the sources of your references.

The current implementation of OA (any of them) is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy: we convinced ourselves that “publishers are evil” and impossible to get rid of, and now we are paying them so that they don’t have to do their job. We basically retired publishers early with an extra pension, all because everyone “wants to believe” in open access. But guess what? This is not disruptive. OA is just as “capitalist evil” as the usual publishing, or even more so. Do you want to be disruptive? The disrupt. Get rid of the publishers. Or at least constrain funding only to not-for-profits for example.

> You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint, and they still paywall it

There's no APC with Green OA, so what money are you talking about? Green OA is regular publishing, but with self archiving. There will be a version freely available, and the publishers aren't paid for that privilege.

If you want a route to the death of publishers, green OA is a promising one.

(I think the headline ought to emphasise that this is pushing green OA, which is the interesting bit)

I’ve had to pay for the option to publish my preprints in a couple of CS journals. I’ll look into that.

Ah, I somewhat see the confusion. Green OA doesn't require the publisher to publish other versions for free, it just means you are allowed to publish them. Typically you'd publish them via an institutional repository, preprint server (often discipline specific), or in one of a number of free online services.

"Green OA is just as meaningless as—-or worse than—-Gold OA. You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the “right” to self-publish the preprint"

that's not how it works. you don't pay anything.

That’s not what I experienced in the past, at least not with IEEE (I stopped caring after a while).

"there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so most people will still trust the paywalled version more than your PDF"

I think this is backwards. The definitive version that should be cited is the freely-available one, since that is the version that everyone can read. No one should cite the paywalled version.

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