Pre-Emptive Gold OA. There is a fundamental strategic point for Open Access (OA) that cannot be made often enough, because it concerns one of the two biggest retardants on OA progress today -- and the retardant that has, I think, lately become the bigger of the two.
The biggest retardant on OA progress today is...a distracting focus on pre-emptive Gold OA (including the conflation of the journal affordability problem with the research accessibility problem, and the conflation of Gold OA with OA itself, wrongly supposing that OA or "full OA" means Gold OA -- instead of concentrating all efforts on universalizing Green OA mandates....
Just as it is true that there would be no research accessibility problem if the the journal affordability problem were solved (because all institutions, and all their researchers, would then have affordable access to all journals), it is also true that the journal affordability problem would cease to be a real problem if the research accessibility problem were solved: If all researchers (indeed everyone) could access all journal articles for free online, then it would no longer matter how much journals cost, and which institutions were willing and able to pay for which journals. After universal Green OA, journals may or may not eventually become more affordable, or convert to Gold OA: It would no longer matter either way, for we would already have OA -- full OA -- itself....
Green OA Can Be Mandated, Gold OA Cannot.But here there is an equally fundamental difference: Green OA self-archiving can be accelerated and scaled up to universality (and this can be done at virtually zero cost) by the research community alone -- i.e., research institutions (largely universities) and research funders -- by mandating Green OA. In contrast, Gold OA depends on publishers, costs money (often substantial money), and cannot be mandated by institutions and funders....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/16/2009 01:21:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
