From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:45:12 +0100

1. The Green/Gold Open Access (OA) distinction concerns whether it is
the author or the publisher that provides the OA.

2. This distinction was important to mark with clear terms because the
conflation of the two roads to OA has practical implications and has
been holding up OA progress for a decade and a half.

3. The distinction between paid Gold and free Gold is very far from
being a straightforward one.

4. Free Gold can be free (to the author) because the expenses of the
Gold journal are covered by subscriptions, subsidies or volunteerism.

5. The funds for Paid Gold can come from the author's pocket, the
author's research grant, the author's institution or the author's
funder.

6. It would be both absurd and gratuitously confusing to mark each of
these economic-model differences with a color-code.

7. Superfluous extra colors would also obscure the role that the
colour-code was invented to perform: distinguishing author-side OA
provision from publisher-side OA provision.

8. So, please, let's not have "diamond," "platinum" and "titanium" OA,
despite the metallurgical temptations.

9. They amplify noise instead of pinpointing the signal, just as
SHERPA/Romeo's parti-colored Blue/Yellow/Green spectrum (mercifully
ignored by almost everyone) does.

10. OA is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed journal
articles, not about cost-recovery models for OA publishing (Gold OA).

11. The Gold that publishers are fighting for and that researcher
funders are subsidizing (whether "pure" or "hybrid") is paid Gold, not
free Gold.

12. No one knows whether or how free Gold will be sustainable, any
more than they know whether or how long subscription publishing can
co-exist viably with mandatory Green OA.

13. So please leave the economic ideology and speculation out of the
pragmatics of OA policy making by the research community (institutions
and funders).

14. Cost-recovery models are the province of publishers (Gold OA).

15. What the research community needs to do is mandate OA provision.

16. The only OA provision that is entirely in the research community's
hands is Green OA.

And, before you ask, please let's not play into the publishers' hands
by colour-coding OA also in terms of the length of the publisher
embargo: 3-month OA, 6-month OA, 12-month-OA, 24-month-OA, millennial
OA: OA means immediate online access. Anything else is delayed access.
(The only quasi-exception is the "Almost-OA" provided by the author
via the institutional repository's email-eprint-request Button when
complying with publisher embargoes -- but that too is clearly not OA,
which is immediate, free online access.)

And on no account should the genuine, substantive distinction between
Gratis OA (free online access) and Libre OA (free online access plus
various re-use rights) be color-coded (with a different shade for
every variety of CC license)!


On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:13 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Beall, Jeffrey" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:45:20 -0600
>
> Dear Jean-Claude Guédon:
>
> There are some, including me, who make the distinction between gold
> open-access and platinum open-access.
>
> Gold = free to reader, author pays article processing charge
>
> Platinum = free to reader, free to author
>
> This distinction is important and has value, I think, because it shows
> two different funding models for open-access publishing. So I do
> believe, as you say, that gold really means author-pay journals.
> Conflating the two models under a single appellation initiates
> confusion and ambiguity.
>
> Using the more precise terminology enables clearer communication and
> does not semantically lump together two things that are inherently
> different.
>
> Jeffrey Beall, MA, MSLS, Associate Professor
>
> Scholarly Initiatives Librarian
> Auraria Library
> University of Colorado Denver
> Denver, Colo.  80204 USA
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> From: Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:29:19 -0400
> Thank you for this URL. I listened to it and said to myself: only the
> French (I was born there) can defend open access with lopsided
> arguments...
>
> Two noted mistakes:
>
> * PLoS does not practice peer review and relies on comments after
> publication !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> * Gold, i.e. OA journals, really means author-pay OA journals
> !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> Of course, in the latter case, many publishers are intent on
> propagating this false conflation of Gold and author-pay as it is the
> business model they use to preserve their revenue stream in the OA
> context.
>
> The battle for vocabulary and words  is also part of the battle for OA.
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon