**Cross-Posted** Richard Poynder - *The OA Interviews*: *Ian Gibson, former Chairman of the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee*<http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-oa-interviews-ian-gibson-former.html>
Another brilliant OA whodunnit by Richard Poynder! Yet the plot thickens, with the mystery of the outcome of the 2004 UK Select Committee deliberations still not altogether dispelled. Ian Gibson is clearly brilliant, and his heart is clearly in the right place. But although his 2004Gibson Committee Report<http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm> clearly had (and continues to have) enormous (positive) ramifications for OA worldwide, Ian himself just as clearly *does not fully grasp those ramifications*! *Journal and Author Selectivity.* Ian still thinks that OA is about somehow weaning authors from their preferred highly selective journals (such as * Nature*), even though the cost-free Green OA that his own Report recommended mandating *does not require authors to give up their preferred journals*, thereby mooting this issue (and even though the ominous new prospect of double-paying publishers for hybrid Gold OA out of shrinking research funds favoured by the Finch Committee Report<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september12/harnad/09harnad.html%3E> does not require authors to give up their preferred journals either). Research access, assessment and affordability are being conflated here. Green OA does not solve the affordability problem directly, but it sure makes it much less of a life/death matter (since everyone has Green access, whether or not they can afford subscription access). And of course that in turn makes subscription cancelations, publisher cost-cutting, downsizing and conversion to Gold much more likely -- while also releasing the institutional subscription cancelation windfall savings to pay the much lower post-Green Gold OA cost many times over. This leaves journals' peer-review standards and selectivity up to the peers -- and journal choice up to the authors -- where both belong. Giving up authors' preferred journals in favour of pure Gold OA journals was what (I think) BMC's Vitek Tracz and Jan Velterop had been lobbying for at the time (and that is not what the Gibson Report ended up recommending)! *Emily Commander. *So I think if you really want to get to the heart of the mystery of how the Gibson Report crystallized into the epochal recommendation for all UK universities and funders to mandate Green OA you will have to dig deeper, Richard, and interview its author, Emily Commander, who -- as Ian indicates -- was the one who crafted it out of the cacophony of conflicting testimonials. Don't ask Emily about the bulk of the report, which is largely just ballast, but about how she arrived at its revolutionary core recommendation<http://openaccess.eprints.org/%3Ca%20href=>. That's what this is all about... *Stevan Harnad*
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