Keynote Lecture Two

Open Access: Green, Gold, Gratis, Libre, North, South -- How To Get There

Stevan Harnad
Chaire de recherche du Canada en sciences cognitives,
Département de psychologie,
Université du Québac à Montréal
&
Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton

 

Open Access (OA) to peer-reviewed journal articles has two components: free online access ("Gratis OA") and certain re-use rights ("Libre OA"). OA benefits both authors and users (and their institutions and funders, in developed as well as developing countries) by maximizing user access and thereby maximizing research usage and impact. There are two ways for authors to provide OA: By publishing in a subscription journal and depositing the final draft in their institutional OA repository when it is accepted for publication ("Green OA") or by publishing in an OA journal ("Gold OA").  Most journals (and almost all the top journals) are still subscription journals. Gold OA can be costly to the author, and the money to pay for it is still locked into subscriptions.  So institutions and funders first need to mandate (require) Green Gratis OA. Once Gratis Green OA is universally mandated and available free for all, institutions can cancel journal subscriptions, journals can cut costs and convert to Libre Gold OA by offloading access-provision and archiving onto the worldwide network of Green OA institutional repositories and downsizing to just providing peer review, paid for by authors' institutions, per outgoing paper submitted, out of a fraction the institution's annual windfall savings from cancelling subscriptions for incoming journals.