Stevan and other proponents of OA are adamant that embargoes are unacceptable. 
It is a huge fight, a very unequal one. What is likely to happen to give the 
final word to these advocates and lead to embargo elimination is the fact that 
embargoed journals are not going to get the citations that green-friendly 
journals are going to get. This will mean that embargoed journals are going to 
receive lower Journal Impact Factors (JIF), as computed by Thomson Reuters.

Despite all the complaints about the JIF, the JIF is widely used, and a lower 
IF means receiving fewer and sometimes lower quality manuscripts, a vicious 
circle that will erode a journal’s prestige. Embargoes are also going to 
encourage authors to seek publications in gold journals and to experiment with 
new venues that offer a more innovative, more disruptive model. This means that 
publishers who insist on an embargo period are going to hurt their journals by 
lowering their intrinsic value and competitiveness. Though research to date has 
concentrated on how much green increases the citedness of individual articles, 
the same effect can only be reflected in aggregate for  journals – this is a 
mechanical truth. This lowering of the impact factor will be helped by the 
prescribed use of DOI from the birth of papers as many publishers are insisting 
that preprints carry the final version DOI and point to the paying version of 
articles. So although publishers may see embargoes as helping to protect the 
value of their subscription-based journals, quite the opposite is very likely 
to happen.

This is a serious consideration as strictly subscription-based papers (with no 
archiving) have the least impact on average  in 7 out of 22 academic/scientific 
fields. See 
http://science-metrix.com/files/science-metrix/publications/d_1.8_sm_ec_dg-rtd_proportion_oa_1996-2013_v11p.pdf
  p.24.

It is therefore an essential practice to generalize the use of a single 
homogeneous DOI in all archives to help Thomson Reuters accurately compute the 
aggregate impact of papers and of journals, and to monitor the adverse effect 
of embargoes on the reputation of journals.

Eric Archambault
Science-Metrix
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