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 is no available evidence base to indicate that short or even zero embargoes cause cancellation of subscriptions. Evidence from the ﬁeld of high-energy physics shows that despite nearly 100% immediate, unembargoed deposit (Green), subscriptions have not been damaged. The €4 million EU funded PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project (2012) showed that trafﬁc to journal websites increased when articles were made available through a publicly accessible repository, possibly because interest grew as articles were disseminated more widely.52

The ﬁeld of high-energy physics is one that recurs in studies of open access because it is the discipline with the longest history of green self-archiving (open access). Although this presents problems of disciplinary speciﬁcity and especially the ease with which it can wrongly be assumed that all disciplines will follow the same route, the only real evidence that we have for existing models comes from the sciences. In this discipline, almost every journal allows green open access immediately with no embargo period. As the BIS inquiry noted, this has not resulted in cancellations. In fact, the PEER project showed, somewhat counter-intuitively, that making articles green open access (across a variety of disciplines) correlated to more visitors to the ofﬁcial publisher journal websites.

In terms of humanities disciplines, however, the committee also noted that ‘Several submissions argued that short embargo periods were more harmful to HASS (humanities, arts and social sciences) than STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine) disciplines. The most frequently deployed argument in HASS subjects is that since works in these disciplines have longer citation half-lives (i.e. are referred to over a longer period) a longer embargo is necessary.’53 This is, in fact, the exact line of argument taken by Rebecca Darley, Daniel Reynolds and Chris Wickham in a recent report for the British Academy.54 The BIS committee rejected this argument, however, noting that they did not receive any evidence to support this recommendation.55

Assuming, however, that a move beyond green to a gold route was desired, one in which publishing labour was remunerated from the supply side, one essential truth must always stand as a starting point: there is enough money within the total global system to cover the current rate of publication. Certainly, under the present arrangement, there is an insufﬁciently equitable distribution of capital