Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold

TL;DR

This paper critiques the idea of mixing Green and Gold open access strategies, advocating instead for mandated self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles to achieve full open access rapidly.

Contribution

It argues that mandating self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles is the most effective way to achieve comprehensive open access, dismissing the proposed Green-Gold mixing approach.

Findings

Mandating self-archiving can rapidly achieve 100% open access.

Mixing Green and Gold strategies is less practical than mandated Green self-archiving.

The proposed Green-Gold hybrid approach is speculative and less effective.

Abstract

This article is a critique of: "The 'Green' and 'Gold' Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching" by Jean-Claude Guedon (in Serials Review 30(4) 2004). Open Access (OA) means: free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles. Jean-Claude Guedon argues against the efficacy of author self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles (the "Green" road to OA). He suggests instead that we should convert to Open Access Publishing (the "Golden" road to OA) by "mixing and matching" Green and Gold as follows: o First, self-archive dissertations (not published, peer-reviewed journal articles). o Second, identify and tag how those dissertations have been evaluated and reviewed. o Third, self-archive unrefereed preprints (not published, peer-reviewed journal articles). o Fourth, develop new mechanisms for evaluating and reviewing those unrefereed preprints, at multiple levels. The result will be OA Publishing (Gold). I argue that rather than yet another 10 years of speculation like this, what is actually needed (and imminent) is for OA self-archiving to be mandated by research funders and institutions so that the self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed journal articles (Green) can be fast-forwarded to 100% OA.