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A Eulogy for Hybrid OA

RIPhybridOA

  • you weren’t much loved in your short existence
  • you weren’t much use to readers or text-miners because we often couldn’t find where you were – hiding amongst shadows.
  • you were significantly more expensive than your ‘full’ open access cousins

In March, 2015 ‘hybrid OA’ died after a short-life of neglect. Elsevier put the final nail in the coffin, but it wasn’t just they who were responsible, other publishers were plainly guilty of hybrid OA neglect too.

Publishers gave birth to the cash-cow that was hybrid OA not long ago. The profits were immense: $5000 for a single article in some greedy cases. Yet after each ‘hybrid OA’ article was born, and the profit raked in, the hybrid OA articles were completely neglected post-publication. Much like their shuttered, not-allowed-to-play-outside-the-paywall brothers & sister articles. They were forgotten about, even though their authors had stumped-up significant funds upfront to ensure their freedom forever.

Hybrid OA - a cash-cow

Hybrid OA was a wonderfully profitable system for the publisher/carers. It enabled bountiful double-dipping – additional revenue for providing exactly the same content. Laughably, the publisher/carers claimed  that it was “not happening at all“, but anyone with a brain knew better.

But too much neglect of the hybrids over the years led to many high-profile instances of triple-dipping: subscription revenue, APC fees, AND $31.50 (+ tax) per article reader charges (for content that had already been paid to be made free for readers, forever).

A variety of rightly concerned funders started a trend banning authors from sending their articles to hybrid OA profiteer-merchants, for their own good. Only full OA venues could be trusted to actually do the job and the keep the articles outside paywalls.

In short, legacy publishers themselves killed hybrid OA through their own carelessness. Authors, librarians, research funders and readers simply didn’t trust publishers to do hybrid OA properly, and had amassed plenty of evidence of their ineptitude. They tried to sweep the problem of a flawed and difficult system under the carpet as just ‘bumps in the road‘ to open access but actually hybrid OA was just a wrong turn all along.

Hybrid OA Is The Wrong Way
Hybrid OA Is The Wrong Way

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