Golden Road to Open Access: Generic reply to generic query

[Stevan Harnad]

** Cross-posted **

On 2011-03-20, at 5:40 AM, [identity deleted] wrote:

      Dear Mr. Harnad,
      Sorry for my ignorance. But is it possible to speak about  the
      golden road to open access and whether any institutions have taken
      up that road at all.
      Thank you in advance.
      Best regards,
      [identity deleted]


The golden road to Open Access (OA) is to publish in Gold OA journals (free for
the user online).

The green road to OA is to publish in conventional (non-OA) journals and to make
the articles OA (free for the user online) by self-archiving them in the
author's institutional repository.

About 20% of journals (but not the top 20%) are Gold OA journals.

Institutions and funders can mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving, but they
cannot mandate Gold OA publishing. 

(They can neither require 80% publishers to be Gold OA nor can they require
their researchers to publish in 20% Gold OA journals and not in 80% non-OA
journals. There is also little or no extra institutional money to pay for Gold
OA publication fees while the institutions' potential funds are still being
spent on their annual journal subscriptions.)

Mandating Green OA can provide 100% OA (Green OA) with certainty.

Once it is universally mandated, 100% Green OA will probably (but not with
certainty) lead to institutional subscription cancelations, making subscriptions
no longer sustainable as the way of covering the remaining costs of publication.
 If/when that comes to pass, journals will convert to Gold OA, and the Gold OA
publication fees will be paid out of the institutional windfall subscription
cancelation savings.
 
See:

      http://www.openscholarship.org/

http://roarmap.eprints.org/

Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be
Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving.
Logos http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in
press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic
Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe &
Darren Wershler, Eds.) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18511/

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton
Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp.
55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior
Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A.
(Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on
E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society, 13-22
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21003/ 

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16
(7/8). http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/ 

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. &
Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal.
Chandos. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15617/


Stevan Harnad