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A tersely expressed rationale for the "Green first, Gold next" approach. Excerpt: "...once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs -- and that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA. That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price)."

Abstract: The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work. This short paper sets out the main conclusions of our work, which was designed to explore the overall costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), as well as identify the most cost-effective policy basis for transitioning to OA at national and institutional levels. The main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost.

Interesting blog post by Stephen Curry from the 25/2/2013 Royal Society's conference "Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research". Excerpt (but the post has a broader focus than this): " I would like to hear more from advocates of a transition based only on green OA mandates on exactly how the ultimate switch to gold OA can be made from the melee of subscription cancellations that they reckon will be the inevitable consequence of the success of their approach, particularly since green OA depends on compliance from the companies and learned societies that will suffer short-term financial losses. The transition problem, whatever the route plotted through it, remains a tough nut to crack. No-one I spoke to at Monday's meeting had a clear idea of how it would occur. We are on an experimental journey feeling our way more or less blindly - a source of occasional but considerable frustration. "

Mike Taylor writes sceptically about Green OA highlighting practical risks of relying on institutional repositories, and pointing to four "in principal" reasons for scepticism: the "two class" system; the expense of continuing subscriptions; embargoes; and non-open licences.

Cost-effectiveness of open access publications by Jevin West, Theodore Bergstrom and Carl T. Bergstrom. Tool: http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/ Abstract: "Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis | the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. However, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive publication charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choosing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their publication fees."

An edited transcript of a talk by Shieber, who is Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard University. Provides an economic analysis of journal access as "complementary good", and argues that an APC based system is more efficient (from a market economics point of view) that a subscription based system.

Abstract: "Irrespective of what funds the UK elects to spend on paying pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid, and independent of embargo policy, the UK should (1) mandate and enforce immediate deposit of the author's peer-reviewed final draft of every journal article in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication and (2) designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review and research assessment."

Key passage: "But, achieving open access is not easy. Professional maintenance and distribution of large digital archives, guaranteed for the long term, does incur significant cost. The most promising model for recovering such costs under an open-access regime is an author-pays (or, in effect, a funding institution pays) model. Such a scheme introduces issues of its own. If publishers generate revenue by producing more content (paid for by authors) rather than quality content (paid for by subscribers), then the natural tendency in the system will be for the generation of large quantities of low-quality content. Indeed, we have seen the rise of predatory publishers, actively seeking authors to pay for publication in venues devoid of the exacting scrutiny of conscientious peer review. The result is a glut of third-rate publications that add noise rather than insight to the scientific enterprise. The important question is: Can we establish a sustainable economic model for publication that serves the interest of both authors and the reading public? We submit that non-profit professional societies must play a critical role in this regard. They are the hallmark of quality in publications, and must remain so to serve the interests of the reading public. But, how do we transition from the current subscription model to a new financial model enabling open access in a way that does not bankrupt the organization in the process? This question has occupied the attention of the ACM Publications Board for several years. Because the stakes are high, the Board has chosen to move with caution."