Re: The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access Stevan Harnad 12 Nov 2003 14:13 UTC
On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Steve Hitchcock wrote: > The authors of this viewpoint in the Lancet seem to have got OAI and > Eprints.org muddled: > > "The Open Archives Initiative (http://www. openarchives.org) aims to create > a global online archive of all published research and is funded by the > Joint Information Systems Committee, part of the UK government's Higher > Education Funding Councils of England, Scotland, and Wales.13 Its chief > proponent, Stephen Harnad of Southampton University, UK, calls for all > research, after publication, to be posted on personal or institutional > websites and tagged in a standardised form, making it searchable, > navigable, and retrievable. If publishers do not allow authors to post > their articles on personal or institutional websites, Harnad suggests they > post the submitted draft together with a corrigendum file highlighting the > differences between it and the published version. Although this approach is > not an alternative to the current subscription-based publishing model, it > could improve access within it." > Ref 13 Open Archives Initiative. www.eprints.org Site accessed Feb 23, 2003. > > Pritpal S Tamber, Fiona Godlee, Peter Newmark > Open access to peer-reviewed research: making it happen > http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol362/iss9395/full/llan.362.9395.editorial_and_review.27694.1 > (free registration required) Muddled indeed, and more than just muddled. What these BMC authors can't quite bring themselves to say (being advocates of the golden road rather than the green road to open access) is not only that the green road of open-access self-archiving is indeed a road to *open access* (not merely "improved access" but *open access*, in the full sense of the word), but that it is a far faster and surer road than the golden one, and the only one open for most of the annual research literature today! The popular press is at the moment in a paroxysm of euphoria about the golden road to open access (open-access publishing), and mute or muddled about the green road (open-access self-archiving). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif When the noise subsides and the air clears we will see the real access landscape more clearly again, and what we will see is that all the euphoria has been about a very small portion of the yearly traffic of 2,500,000 toll-access articles. The 560 golden journals are only conveying about 60,000 of those 2,500,000 yearly articles to open access (i.e., less than 5%). http://www.doaj.org/ The green road is conveying at least three times as many already, and is growing faster (without getting the press fanfare, partly, no doubt, because no product is being promoted, and partly because of just plain simplistic thinking by the press and the public); but even that three-fold greater volume of open access is still a pathetically small portion of the yearly traffic. The difference, though, is that the traffic along the green road can be immediately increased to (at the *very least*) 55% of the total annual 2,500,000, virtually overnight, whereas the traffic along the golden road can only be increased as quickly as we can create, fund, fill and sustain new golden journals, journal by journal. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0021.gif http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0024.gif I hope we will soon separate the reality from the rhapsodizing, rechannel the welcome new open-access awareness and support, and focus on attaining more open access, now, in the way that is so obviously within our reach. I'm afraid that all this eminently accessible open-access will continue to be needlessly delayed as long as our attention and enthusiasm continue to be directed solely or primarily at the slower road. We should really be promoting both roads, and each in proportion to its immediate capacity to deliver open access. What is happening now is instead rather like trying to increase the population by promoting in vitro fertilization alone, neglecting the faster, surer path... http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0028.gif It is certainly true, as the authors of the Lancet article state, that open-access self-archiving "is not an alternative to the current subscription-based publishing model." Let us not forget that this is not the "alternative-to-the-current-subscription-based-model" initiative. It is the *open-access* initiative. And the golden road (with the changes in the subscription model that it requires) is just one of the two roads leading to it (and not the fastest or surest). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.1 The rest is just speculation. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2 Stevan Harnad