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research does require scholarly communication, and to that extent research - and research funders - should be concerned that however it is (or should be) arranged, that there is a sustainable model for it. That includes ensuring continued, sustainable communication during any transition phase.

If you insist on speculating, here's a transition scenario:

1. Green OA universally mandated by institutions and funders.

2. Universal Green OA.

3. Institutional cancellation pressure.

4. Publishers cut costs, downsize, phase out obsolete products and services like print and PDF, offload access provision and archiving on OA IRs, convert to Fair-Gold OA.

5. Journal titles from publishers not willing to continue on this lower Fair-Gold scale migrate to Fair-Gold publishers who are willing.

Harnad, Stevan (2013) The Postgutenberg Open Access Journal (revised). In, Cope, B and Phillips, A (eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal (2nd edition). 2nd edition of book Chandos. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/353991/

Even for the full set of services currently provided, there isn't justification that the subscription model must be sustained.

Yes, but that's the institution's sustainability (budgetary) problem -- not the same as the publisher's subscription sustainability problem.

Universal Green will fix that...

But I wouldn't be so quick to write-off "no longer necessary" activities by publishers. As it currently stands, the publisher's copy is a verifiable record of peer-review taking place. It's also the version assigned pagination information which is still used by convention for citations (even in the presence of persistent identifiers). It's also the means by which the publication is tracked in PubMed, WoS, Scopus, etc.

a. The VoR will remain the publisher-tagged version, now (paid by subscriptions) as well as post-Green (paid by Fair-Gold).

b. Pagination (forgive me, is an utterly, utterly trivial non-problem)

c. Double-ditto for indexing.

This is not double payment. It's just payment. If the Gold OA publishers did not exist, then there would be more closed access / subscription journals than there are now, and you would be paying more / higher subscription fees.

That's a guess.

The must-have journals, the core of the serials crisis, are not a whit cheaper, today, nor less must-have, just because there are also Fools-Gold journals available to authors who would rather (or are pushed by their Finchy funders's preferences to) pay extra money for OA instead of just providing it for free, as Green OA.

Institutions' serials needs and expenditures on subscriptions have not gone down as a result of Fools Gold. The Fools Gold payments are over and above the subscription payments.

You can't assess the potential for double-dipping based on the amount of Gold OA articles that are published. In fact, it's probably not helpful to even think consider double-dipping at all.

Double-dipping refers only to hybrid Fools-Gold (subscriptions + Fools-Gold). I doubt there's much uptake yet, but it's certainly not true that it's not worth "considering": It's worth very closely monitoring.

For a hybrid journal, there is a simpler point of comparison - APC vs average subscription revenue for closed access articles. Regardless of where the journal is positioned in the market, you would expect these should be roughly equivalent, or slightly favouring the APC.

I think you are very mistaken!

The hybrid-Gold publisher sets the price per article for their hybrid-Gold APC articles, and you can be sure they set APCs to ensure that their total revenue does not shrink. Unless they keep adjusting either the subscription price or the APC to keep the Fools Gold APC from increasing their revenue, they are double-dipping (since the APCs are over and above the subscription income, which is uncancelled and uncancellable -- until we have universal Green OA).

If, with 100% Gold OA, there was a viable opportunity to downsize publishing services, then somebody would surely do it - just as Gold OA publishers exist today because there was a viable opportunity to establish a new business model. Green OA is not the only route to that outcome.

If there were 100% Gold OA -- whether Fools Gold or Fair Gold -- I would not be bothering with any of this, because my goal, as a researcher, is to solve the research accessibility problem (which OA solves), not to solve the journal affordability problem (which Green OA would solve).

But we do not have 100% Gold OA today. We just have about 10-20% Fools-Gold OA, over-priced, double-paid, and -- if hybrid -- also double-dipped.

And we need 100% OA.

And the way to get that is to mandate Green OA.

Let researchers, their institutions and their funders take care of OA, by mandating Green OA, and the publishers' practices and business models will take care of themselves, adapting to the new PostGutenberg niche for peer-reviewed journal publishing in the online era.

100% immediate, post peer-review Green OA might make the revenue and therefore costs of publishers unsustainable. But if that happens, will they still have an incentive to incur the costs of downsizing? Or could they just shutter all of their (scholarly communication) activities?

Vide supra: Some titles will downsize and convert. Others will migrate to Fair-Gold publishers. Some titles will die (it happens all the time).

I think we should stop speculating about future business models and first do the obvious, optimal and inevitable: mandate universal Green.

Then go back to speculating, if you like.

Or we could find out that despite all expectations, nothing much happens to nothing much happens to subscription costs (because primary links are still to the publisher's site, etc.) - in which case, nothing much changes.

It is definitely a possibility (though I think an unlikely one) that universal mandatory Green OA will only solve the research accessibility problem, but not the journal affordability problem:

So what?

Researchers (and the tax-paying public) will have 100% OA.

And if institutions continue to sustain subscriptions, that will become a matter of choice, thanks to Green OA, and no longer the life-or-death matter it is now, with the research not accessible to users any other way.

(Think about it.)

Whilst some outcomes may appear to be more likely than others, nothing is actually certain.

Agreed. The only certainties are (1) mathematical proof (and there's none of that here) or (2) empirical facts that have already happened.

So let's stop speculating and make universal Green OA happen. It's fully accessible, and already long overdue...