Murray State University’s A.J. Boston, writing in C&RL News on so-called “transformative agreements” (TAs, aka read-and-publish deals):
On balance, any upsides that TAs may present are negated by the normalization of paying-to-publish, posing huge problems for equity. […] Suffice to say, this is not the sort of librarianship that I want to play a part in, where we spend vast sums of money to provide knowledge access for a select few in such a way that ends up excluding the many.
Boston’s is one voice among a growing chorus of librarians speaking out against the author-excluding read-and-publish deal. (MIT’s Chris Bourg is another.)
Boston’s own alternative, dubbed “Read & Let Read,” is mostly about tweaking the fairness of the existing subscription regime. It isn’t, as he admits, a route to diamond OA—but it has the signal virtue of leaning open while not, at the same time, paving the road for the conglomerates’ APC-based OA capture.