[GOAL] Re: Paid Gold vs. Free Gold

[Jan Velterop]

Are there examples of such "subscription journals that make their online version freely accessible online (immediately upon publication)."

Who would subscribe, and what would a subscription entail?

Jan Velterop

On 19 Apr 2013, at 05:16, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
> The reference to free Gold journals covered by subscriptions is not clear to me. Is this a reference to SCOAP3?
> 
> It's a reference to all subscription journals that make their online version freely accessible online (immediately upon publication).
> 
> (No, SCOAP3 is a premature and unnecessary post-hoc consortial "membership" scheme that I think will not prove sustainable. The HEP fields have already provided near 100% (Green) OA for 20 years, un-mandated. What's needed next is for institutions and funders to mandate that all other disciplines do likewise.)
> 
>  Stevan Harnad
> 
> Le jeudi 18 avril 2013 à 07:45 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
>> 
>> 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, despite the metallurgical temptations.
>> 9. They amplify noise instead of pinpointing the signal, just as SHERPA/Romeo's parti-colored Blue/Yellow/Green spectrum (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" 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 (free online access) and Libre OA (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. Serials Review 30. Shorter version: The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus. 
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