In summer of 2023, the Open Access (OA) Guild submitted the “Open Access Collection Development Strategies, FY 24-28” to the Deans of the CU Boulder Libraries. Within this plan, the OA Guild indicates “this report does not include recommendations related to CU Scholar, Green OA infrastructure, or other open infrastructural efforts, which are being addressed separately by various groups in the Libraries,and that the Head of Data and Scholarly Communication Services would lead a separate effort to provide recommendations for Green OA infrastructure. The following supplemental document represents an effort to close these gaps as well as to emphasize the importance of Green OA to the Libraries’ overall OA strategy.

Recent studies scrutinizing the consolidation of commercial publishers and their adoption of OA publishing - along with the article processing charges (APCs) often associated with it - underline the importance of diversified and equity-minded approaches to OA. As outlined by Butler et. al., the top four academic publishers (Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer-Nature, and Taylor & Francis) publish over half of scholarly journal articles indexed in Web of Science. This consolidation leads to reduced competition and influences price-setting, as there is little market pressure to keep APCs at or below current inflation rates. As a result, from 2015 to 2018 five publishers generated $1.06 billion in revenue from APCs for Gold and Hybrid OA, in addition to their revenue streams from subscription publishing. While it is a goal of the Libraries to advance the accessibility of university research outputs, these findings indicate that “[i]nstead of making scholarly publishing sustainable and accessible for all, high APCs and transformative agreements aim to preserve the status quo, where academic publishing is a highly profitable business for a few corporations'' (Butler et. al, 19).

Green OA, or self-archiving, whereby an author posts a work to a repository so it may be downloaded for free, remains an essential option for authors without the resources to pay an APC and one of the most equitable and sustainable pieces of the OA puzzle for both authors and libraries seeking to support Green OA publishing. For this reason, the following plan is not merely a supplement to the CU Boulder Libraries collection development strategies – it is a fundamental component of our larger goal of transforming the scholarly ecosystem to one that is more open, transparent, and sustainable.