[BOAI] New article: Anatomy of Green OA

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear all,

A manuscript of ours about Green OA has just been accepted for 
publishing in the Journal of the American Association for Information 
Science and Technology. It will take a few months before the article 
will actually be published, but we have put up a green version at
http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc8/Personal%20VersionGreenOa.pdf

Here is the abstract

Bo-Christer Björk, Mikael Laakso, Patrik Welling, Patrik Paetau:
Anatomy of Green Open Access


Open Access (OA) is the free unrestricted access to electronic versions 
of scholarly publications. For peer reviewed journal articles there are 
two main routes to OA, publishing in OA journals (gold OA) or archiving 
of article copies or manuscripts at other web locations (green OA). This 
study focuses on summarizing and extending upon current knowledge about 
green OA. A synthesis of previous studies indicates that the green OA 
coverage of all published journal articles is approximately 12 %, with 
substantial disciplinary variation. Typically, green OA copies become 
available with considerable time delays, partly caused by publisher 
imposed embargo periods, and partly by author tendencies to archive 
manuscripts only periodically. Although green OA copies should ideally 
be archived in proper repositories, a large share is stored on home 
pages and similar locations, with no assurance of long-term 
preservation. Often such locations contain exact copies of published 
articles, which may infringe on the publisher’s exclusive rights. The 
technical foundation for green OA uploading is becoming increasingly 
solid, which is largely due to the rapid increase in the number of 
institutional repositories. The number of articles within the scope of 
OA mandates, which strongly influence the self-archival rate of 
articles, is nevertheless still low.