The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: The Culture of Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age, pp. 99-105, L'Harmattan.

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Abstract

What the research community needs, urgently, is free online access (Open Access, OA) to its own peer-reviewed research output. Researchers can provide that in two ways: by publishing their articles in OA journals (Gold OA) or by continuing to publish in non-OA journals and self-archiving their final peer-reviewed drafts in their own OA Institutional Repositories (Green OA). OA self-archiving, once it is mandated by research institutions and funders, can reliably generate 100% Green OA. Gold OA requires journals to convert to OA publishing (which is not in the hands of the research community) and it also requires the funds to cover the Gold OA publication costs. With 100% Green OA, the research community's access and impact problems are already solved. If and when 100% Green OA should cause significant cancellation pressure (no one knows whether or when that will happen, because OA Green grows anarchically, article by article, not journal by journal) then the cancellation pressure will cause cost-cutting, downsizing and eventually a leveraged transition to OA (Gold) publishing on the part of journals. As subscription revenues shrink, institutional windfall savings from cancellations grow. If and when journal subscriptions become unsustainable, per-article publishing costs will be low enough, and institutional savings will be high enough to cover them, because publishing will have downsized to just peer-review service provision alone, offloading text-generation onto authors and access-provision and archiving onto the global network of OA Institutional Repositories. Green OA will have leveraged a transition to Gold OA.

Item Type:	Book Section
Creator/Authors:	Stevan Harnad
Editors:	Gacs Anna
Keywords:	open access, self-archiving, library budgets, green OA, gold OA, institutional repositories, publication costs, publishing reform, leveraged transition, peer review
Research Group:	Current ECS Groups > Web and Internet Science Old ECS Groups > Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
Alternative Locations:	http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/greenroad....
Date:	November 2007
Information about this record:
Performance Indicator:	EZ~01~01~07
Downloads (2010):	86
ID Code:	13309
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2011 10:34
Deposited On:	10 Jan 2007 by Harnad, Stevan

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• The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. (deposited 10 Jan 2007) [Currently Displayed]
  • The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. (deposited 18 May 2008 10:44)

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