The enemy of the good

Abstract

Green open access, the subsection of open access in which no additional money changes hands and a version of a paper is posted online, is the most financially available means of providing broad access to research for many authors and consumes a great amount of librarian time. The most common format of green open access is the deposit of postprints, versions of papers that have been through peer-review but often not copyediting or journal layout and typesetting. Journal publishers allow these versions to be posted with restrictions, based on an understanding that scholars will seek the version of record and cite that work in any future publication. Therefore, the secondary versions do not impede the most valuable metric of journal publication--citations--and do not impact subscriptions, as discovery happens at an individual level and purchasing at an institutional level. Here, Sterman discusses how specifics in publisher\'s green OA policies are bogging down IR deposits of scholarly literature.