Gold journals use various business models and are in no way limited to
the author-institution charge mentioned below. A good counter-example is
Scielo (
http://www.scielo.org) where the journals are simply and
directly subsidized by governmental money on a macro scale, and not on a
per-article basis.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le lundi 11 avril 2005 à 13:06 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> Below is a comment on an article in Wired entitled
> "Open-Access Journals Flourish" (by Randy Dotinga)
> http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67174,00.html?tw=wn_2culthead
> which (as usual) described only the "gold rush" and completely
> overlooked the quiet growth of green:
>
> There are two roads to Open Access (i.e., free online access to
> peer-reviewed journal articles), one of them being the "golden" road
> of publishing the articles in "gold" journals that give away their
> own contents for free online by charging the author-institution for
> publication instead of charging the user-institution for access. Your
> article rightly points out that about 5% of journals (about 1500 out
> of a total of about 24,000) are already gold today. What it did not
> mention was that about 92% of journals are already "green", that is,
> they give their own authors the green light to make their own articles
> Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them in their own institution's Open
> Access Archives. Of the 2.5 million articles published annually today, 5%
> are OA via gold and 15% are OA via green. The exact comparative growth
> rate of Gold vs. Green OA is not yet known, but it is far easier and
> cheaper for an institution to create an OA archive for its own research
> than it is to create a new gold journal (or to convert an established
> journal or publisher to gold), especially with more and more research
> institutions, universities, research funders and governments recommending,
> requesting and even requiring that the peer-reviewed research articles
> they produce and fund should be made accessible to all their would-be
> users online and not just to those whose institutions that can afford
> to subscribe to the journals in which they were published.
>
> Here are a few URLs that fill in the relative gold and green portions of the
> picture that your Wired Story wrongly portrayed as a unilateral "Gold Rush":
>
> Directory of OA ("Gold") Journals (1525/24,000):
> http://www.doaj.org/
> Directory of Green Journal Policies (7753/8427):
> http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
> Number and Growth Rate of Institutional OA Archives:
> http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
> Policy Recommendation of UK Select Committee:
> http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm
> Policy Recommendation of Berlin Declaration:
> http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html
> Registry of Institutional Self-Archiving Policies:
> http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
> OA Self-Archiving FAQ:
> http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
> Bibliography on how maximizing research access maximizes research impact:
> http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
> American Scientist Open Access Forum:
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
>
> Stevan Harnad
> Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum
> Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Université du Québec à Montréal
> Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of Southampton, UK
Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 15:29:43 BST