Last summer NIH issued a new consultation on open access – it may be found at https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-138.html – and then offered stakeholders the opportunity to give their views on the five main options they suggested, each of which is aimed at cutting down OA publishing costs. The views – which were very varied – may be found at https://osp.od.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Compiled-Public-Comments-on-the-RFI-on-Maximizing-Research-Funds-by-Limiting-Allowable-Publishing-Costs.pdf
Recently, NIH has stepped up activity and is likely to issue its directive soon (it has extended its decision-making period). Green OA is one of the options that it is considering.
Gold Leaf has been a keen follower – and, at times, a contributor – to the OA journey from its inception. A particular watershed moment came with the publication of the Finch Report in the UK in 2012, when unexpectedly Dame Janet Finch concluded that the Gold OA model, not the Green, was the fairest and most sustainable way forward. Subsequently national mandates issued in the UK and mainland Europe were heavily influenced by this. In parallel, over the past ten years librarians in many countries have carefully worked their way through the implications of relying on Green OA and essentially concluded that it is not a significant factor when making decisions about subscriptions to journal content. However, there is a perception that the USA has leant more strongly towards Green than other territories.
We decided to contact senior librarians to gauge their views on the NIH Consultation. As we were mainly interested in reactions in the UK and Europe, 14 of the 19 librarians we asked were based in the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Italy. However, to obtain a broader picture, we also had conversations with librarians from Canada, the USA, Turkey, Singapore and Australia. About half of these conversations were conducted by Teams calls, half by emailed exchanges. All the librarians were relatively senior and well-versed in OA matters. All were promised complete anonymity.
Although our sole American participant said that the NIH consultation “had not come up much” in conversations at his university, several European librarians perceived that it was triggered by tensions between the US government and US research ecosystems. The Canadian participant said that budget cuts might make librarians consider options that were previously unthinkable.
Across all participants, there was almost uniform disapproval of funders trying to dictate OA business models. Some pointed out that in the past both cOAlition S and Unesco had tried to dominate in this way without really understanding all the issues. However, they also acknowledged that the NIH consultation had made them think once again about how to spend scarce funds most effectively.
The predominant view among the participating librarians was that advocating or returning to a principally Green solution would be a retrograde step. Although some said they supported Green personally, they could not see ways of making it work as the principal library solution. Reasons they mentioned included difficulties in determining which articles are Green; the outdated technology still being used by the big international repositories; the impracticability of “surfacing Green” for undergraduates; and the impossibility of achieving comprehensive discoverability of Green by researchers, either as suppliers or consumers of scholarly content.
Several participants added that sustainability was now a major preoccupation for academic librarians and therefore continuing to support publishers with strong track records weighs heavily in the balance. Additionally, there has been so much detailed experimentation with different OA business models over time, particularly in Europe, that participants did not believe that full OA or anything approaching it could be achieved through the deployment of a single business model. They said that Diamond, Gold, Green and other emerging models need to be used together to implement an effective overall OA strategy. One respondent said, “It seems both impertinent and naïve of NIH to come up with a belated endorsement of a solution that we moved on from a long time ago.” Even in Denmark, which until recently had a mandate to make Green the go-to OA solution, is moving closer to the rest of Europe by signing some R & P deals, although, unsurprisingly, there was greater sympathy among Danish librarians sympathise for the NIH stance.
Participants conceded that in the future pressures on the library budget could force them to cancel some “non-Core” subscriptions and rely on the Green articles available for those journals. One respondent said that such decisions were most likely to be taken when new subscriptions were being considered, though others said that all subscriptions are and will continue to be regularly reviewed. Subscription decisions are likely still to depend on a range of factors, including cost per download, prestige of the journal and the publisher and the ease – or lack of it – of uploading the AM to the university’s repository.
However, almost all participants said that the greatest sticking point of relying on the IR would be researcher pushback. Researchers are acutely aware of both the publication quality and the prestige they gain from the final published version of their articles in a high-impact journal. “Researchers think publishing in the IR doesn’t count.”
Other factors mentioned by participants included the library’s obligation to provide accessible versions of articles for those with print disabilities – the library can convert but “prefers to point to an accessible version”; whether or not the IR has a robust preservation plan in place; and the poor researcher experience of having to search across multiple repositories. One participant said that monographs were different – often, the Green version is acceptable; but this is not true of journal articles.
The UK participants pointed out that the main UK consortium has just signed R & P deals with the “Big 5” for another three years. One librarian said that librarians are looking at tools such as Unpaywall and analysing subscriptions to see what level of Green may be there and if it is enough to support cancellation decisions – “this is not just about OA, but subscriptions as well.” However, another said that comprehensive use of Unpaywall by librarians is impracticable. Several said that closer dialogue between publishers, funders and libraries is needed, to arrive at a greater understanding and a win-win situation for all. Others said that, regardless of what funders in the West decide, a Green mandate would not work unless it were also accepted by all the research-intensive countries, including China, India and Japan.
In conclusion, the participants we contacted felt very strongly that Green OA was unlikely to be embraced more fully in the foreseeable future. They could not envisage a time when a tipping-point causing massive support for Green might occur. However, Library budgets will continue to be squeezed, making Green a more attractive option; the NIH consultation will continue to increase focus on what “value for money” means; it could heighten the debate on what should follow the Transformative Agreement; and librarians will continue to explore and monitor the effects of a variety of OA models and might come to look more favourably on Green again, given their strong support for it in principle.
[written by Linda Bennett]
Gold Leaf 