Re: Please Don't Conflate Green and Gold OA

From: (wrong string) édon <jean.claude.guedon_at_umontreal.ca>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:14:53 -0500

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Larry is right, and Stevan is right. Both routes should be followed
and both routes should be demanded by students. Let us stop this
exclusive attitude with regard to OA. Two roads exist. They are
equally valuable. Rather than declaring one suprior to the other, it
would be far more useful to examine how to make these two approaches
help each other.

Jean-Claude Guédon


Le mercredi 19 novembre 2008 à 06:41 -0500, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
      At the Students for a Free Culture Conference, Lawrence
      Lessig advised students, on "Remix Culture":
            "I think the obvious, low-hanging-fruit fight
            for the Students for Free Culture
            movement right now is to start having sit-ins
            in universities where they don't adopt Open
            Access publishing rules. It's ridiculous that
            scholars publish articles in journals that
            then charge 5, 10, 15 thousand dollars for
            people around the world to get access to it."

      It may just be because of the wrong choice of words
      ("Open Access publishing rules"), but as stated, this
      does not sound like the right advice to give to students
      on what to do to help persuade universities to provide
      Open Access to their refereed research journal article
      output, nor does it correspond with what is
      being mandated by the 28 pioneer universities and
      departments (including Harvard and Stanford, and 30
      research funders, including NIH) that have actually
      mandated OA.

      As noted in Larry's link, OA is
                  "free, immediate, permanent,
                  full-text, online access, for any
                  user, web-wide... primarily [to]
                  research articles published in
                  peer-reviewed journals."

      But that OA can be provided by two means:
            "Gold OA" publishing (authors publishing in
            journals that make their articles free
            online, sometimes at a fee to the
            author/university) 

            and 

            "Green OA" self-archiving (authors publishing
            articles in whatever journals they choose,
            but depositing their final refereed draft in
            their university's institutional
            repository to make it free online)

      The 28 pioneering universities/departments (and 30
      funders) have all mandated Green OA (mandatory deposit),
      but Larry seems to be advocating that students strike for
      mandating Gold OA (mandatory publishing in a Gold OA
      journal). 

      Please see
                  "The University's Mandate to
                  Mandate Open Access"

      on the Open Students: Students for Open Access to
      Research blog, where I have tried to describe what
      students can do to help persuade universities to provide
      Open Access to their refereed research journal article
      output.

      Stevan Harnad

Jean-Claude Guédon
Université de Montréal
Received on Wed Nov 19 2008 - 15:57:04 GMT