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The UK's continuing leadership and initiative in opening access to research is wonderful and only to be applauded, supported and encouraged. To help make the initiative focused and effective, I would suggest that the following four questions should be given some thought. If "UK public access to UK publicly funded research" is to be the guiding principle, and the two ways of providing it are either the Green OA self-archiving of articles published for free in subscription journals (GRNOA) or the publishing of articles in Gold OA journals for a fee (GLDOA): 1. GLOBALISM. Is the objective really just UK public access to UK research? Is the purpose of publishing research not to have it taken up, built upon, used and applied in further research and applications globally, and reciprocally, to the benefit of the public that funded the research? (And aren't UK OA mandates likely to inspire complementary, reciprocal OA mandates globally?) 2. RECIPROCITY. Does paying unilaterally for GLDOA for UK research -- making UK research freely accessible globally, but with the UK still having to pay subscriptions to access non-UK research -- make sense? Is GRNOA, which does not entail double payment, not more likely to inspire global reciprocity? And would global GRNOA not lead to GLDOA thereafter anyway? 3. BOOKS. What about books resulting from UK publicly funded research? Would it not be a better idea for the time being to merely recommend rather than require that books be made OA, rather than risk resistance from authors who are happy to give away their journal articles but not their books? 4. DATA. What about authors who do not wish to make their research data freely accessible to all immediately, having gathered it for the purpose of analyzing and data-mining it themselves? Would it not be a better idea for the time being to merely recommend rather than require that data be made OA as soon as possible, rather than risk resistance from authors who are happy to give away their journal articles but not their data? Stevan Harnad