[GOAL] Paid Gold vs. Free Gold

[Stevan Harnad]

1. The Green/Gold Open Access (OA) distinction concerns whether it is the
author or the publisher that provides the OA.

2. This distinction was important to mark with clear terms because the
conflation of the two roads to OA has practical implications and has been
holding up OA progress for a decade and a half.

3. The distinction between paid Gold and free Gold is very far from being a
straightforward one.

4. Free Gold can be free (to the author) because the expenses of the Gold
journal are covered by subscriptions, subsidies or volunteerism.

5. The funds for Paid Gold can come from the author's pocket, the author's
research grant, the author's institution or the author's funder.

6. It would be both absurd and gratuitously confusing to mark each of these
economic-model differences with a color-code.

7. Superfluous extra colors would also obscure the role that the
colour-code was invented to perform: distinguishing author-side OA
provision from publisher-side OA provision.

8. So, please, let's not have "diamond," "platinum" and "titanium"
OA<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/993-.html>,
despite the metallurgical temptations.

9. They amplify noise instead of pinpointing the signal, just as
SHERPA/Romeo<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/453-SHERPARoMEO-Publishers-with-Paid-Options-for-Open-Access.html>'s
parti-colored Blue/Yellow/Green
spectrum<http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html#colours>(mercifully
ignored by almost everyone) does.

10. OA is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed journal articles,
not about cost-recovery models for OA publishing (Gold OA).

11. The Gold that publishers are fighting for and that researcher funders
are subsidizing (whether "pure" or "hybrid") is paid Gold, not free Gold.

12. No one knows whether or how free Gold will be sustainable, any more
than they know whether or how long subscription publishing can co-exist
viably with mandatory Green OA.

13. So please leave the economic ideology and speculation out of the
pragmatics of OA policy making by the research community (institutions and
funders).

14. Cost-recovery models are the province of publishers (Gold OA).

15. What the research community needs to do is mandate OA provision.

16. The only OA provision that is entirely in the research community's
hands is Green OA.

And, before you ask, please let's not play into the publishers' hands by
colour-coding OA also in terms of the length of the publisher embargo:
3-month OA, 6-month OA, 12-month-OA, 24-month-OA, millennial OA: OA
means *immediate
online access*. Anything else is delayed access. (The only quasi-exception
is the "Almost-OA<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/839-Publisher-OA-Embargoes,-IDOA-Mandates-and-the-Almost-OA-Button.html>"
provided by the author via the institutional repository's
email-eprint-request Button when complying with publisher embargoes -- but
that too is clearly *not OA,* which is immediate, free online access.)

And on no account should the genuine, substantive distinction between Gratis
OA <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/442-guid.html> (free
online access) and Libre
OA<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/442-guid.html>(free
online access plus various re-use rights) be color-coded (with a
different shade for every variety of CC license)!

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y,
Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact
Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open
Access<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10209/>.
Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open
Access <http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html>. *Nature
Web Focus*.

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:13 PM, LIBLICENSE <liblicense at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: "Beall, Jeffrey" <Jeffrey.Beall at ucdenver.edu>
> Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:45:20 -0600
>
> Dear Jean-Claude Guédon:
>
> There are some, including me, who make the distinction between gold
> open-access and platinum open-access.
>
> Gold = free to reader, author pays article processing charge
>
> Platinum = free to reader, free to author
>
> This distinction is important and has value, I think, because it shows
> two different funding models for open-access publishing. So I do
> believe, as you say, that gold really means author-pay journals.
> Conflating the two models under a single appellation initiates
> confusion and ambiguity.
>
> Using the more precise terminology enables clearer communication and
> does not semantically lump together two things that are inherently
> different.
>
> Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS, Associate Professor
>
> Scholarly Initiatives Librarian
> Auraria Library
> University of Colorado Denver
> Denver, Colo.  80204 USA
> jeffrey.beall at ucdenver.edu
>
>
>
> From: Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca>
> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:29:19 -0400
> Thank you for this URL. I listened to it and said to myself: only the
> French (I was born there) can defend open access with lopsided
> arguments...
>
> Two noted mistakes:
>
> * PLoS does not practice peer review and relies on comments after
> publication !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> * Gold, i.e. OA journals, really means author-pay OA journals
> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> Of course, in the latter case, many publishers are intent on
> propagating this false conflation of Gold and author-pay as it is the
> business model they use to preserve their revenue stream in the OA
> context.
>
> The battle for vocabulary and words  is also part of the battle for OA.
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon
>
>
> Le lundi 15 avril 2013 à 16:50 -0400, LIBLICENSE a écrit :
>
> to the interests of this list. --
>
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