The Colors of Open Access
According to open access advocates, there are two primary colors:
Green OA Self-Archiving: Authors self-archive the articles they publish in the 25,000 peer-reviewed journals
or
Gold OA Publishing: authors publish in one of the c. 3000 OA journals (some still recovering costs through institutional subscriptions, others through author/institutional publication charges) You can find these titles in the Directory of Open Access Journals
Writing in 2006, Karen M. Albert of the Talbot Research Library, Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, predicted a combination of the following to resolve the serials pricing crisis:
- development of more OA (“gold” road) and SPARC-type (lower subscription cost) journals, that over time gain in stature and impact to provide true competition with traditional established titles
- increased implementation of institutional repositories (IRs) and self-archiving, enabled by further development of effective finding tools like OAIster and Google Scholar
- more funders mandating deposit of grant-supported manuscripts in free archives like PubMed Central
Seems like Karen made a good prediction!
