“Unlike Plan S, this is not a policy intended to regulate (or radically reshape) an industry. That is beyond the goal or remit of the Nelson Memo, even if it will impact some business models. What it does is to regulate the conditions required for a researcher to receive federal research funding, and that is where implementation will focus. It will set requirements on funded researchers, not pick a business model that publishers must follow. On this point, the policies will be agnostic, even if they have impact. The difference is important. Implementation plans will specify an end state, and likely say little (if anything) about the route to that end state. That will be left up to the researcher and their service providers (e.g., publishers) to sort out.
Second, one must look at the policy implementations that are currently in place as a result of the Holdren Memo. Presently, funded authors must ensure that a copy of at least the Accepted Manuscript (AM) version of the paper (or better) is deposited in their funder’s designated repository and made publicly available at or before the time when the allowable embargo period, currently 12 months, expires. Funding agencies, particularly the large agencies covered by the Holdren Memo, are conservative organizations, and given that there is currently no additional funding available to support this new policy and that they already have successful infrastructure in place, Occam’s Razor points to the most likely solution as “more of the same, just sooner”….
Again, the Nelson Memo guidance is explicitly agnostic with regard to business models. An insistence on CC BY would most likely eliminate many potential routes to compliance and result in driving things toward the article processing charge (APC) Gold OA model. By leaving out licensing requirements, a broader slate of more equitable routes come into play….
This suggests that APC-driven Gold OA, with its many inequities, may well end up as the dominant route to compliance, largely by default if no other alternatives are sustainable. In some fields Green OA may not be an option for authors if most publishers decide that they have to flip to Gold OA in order to survive.”
