Costello, Eamon ORCID: 0000-0002-2775-6006 (2019) Bronze, free, or fourrée: an open access commentary. Science Editing, 6 (1). pp. 69-72. ISSN 2288-8063
Abstract
Open access publishing, where readers do not pay to access articles, became possible due to the
electronic publishing revolution that is the Internet [1]. The seminal definition of open access,
and one upon which most literature still draws, is that of the “Budapest Open Access Initiative”
(BOAI):
By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of
these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any
other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control
over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited [2].
To achieve this free access to scholarly literature, the BOAI recommends two complementary strategies. The first is self-archival of scholars’ work in dedicated online archives. The second
calls for the establishment of open access journals that ensure immediate open access to the articles they publish without any access restriction or subscription fees to readers.
There are many other definitions of open access, and Bailey [3] gives a useful overview of
others and of the evolution of terminology in this space. However, the BOAI still contains the
fundamental principles and goes hand-in hand with Creative Commons which provides the
most prevalent licensing architecture that enables open access.
The evolution of open access first centered around gold and green options. Green open access, or “the green way to open access,” is modeled on the practices of physicists who, from as
far back as 1991, began archiving personal versions of their papers prior to publication on a
central archive called ArXiv [4]. Gold open access, by contrast, refers to articles that are made
available immediately at the point of publication by the publishing journal itself and as the
manuscript’s final version of record. Such articles are “born free” [5]. How gold access comes
about can vary. Authors may pay an article processing charge (APC), and this may be to a
journal that is completely open access. The rise of open access mega-journals exemplifies an
innovative form of a journal that successfully pursued this model [6]. Journals have also taken
Eamon Costello
70 | Sci Ed 2019;6(1):69-72 http://www.escienceediting.org
a “hybrid” approach, continuing to publish closed-access articles available only via subscription but alongside fully (gold)
open access articles for which authors have paid an APC. Additionally, some open access journals do not charge any APCs.
“Diamond open access” is one term posited to define this
form of non-APC open access:
In the Diamond Open Access Model, not-for-profit, noncommercial organizations, associations or networks publish material that is made available online in digital format,
is free of charge for readers and authors and does not allow
commercial and for-profit reuse [7].
“Platinum” offers an alternative term to “diamond” for a
journal that charges no APCs to authors. Regarding consistency of terminology, it has the advantage that platinum, like
gold, is a metal and that it is more valuable than gold. Both
diamond and platinum are now used and mean broadly the
same thing. However, it will be a new term—bronze open access—that the remainder of this paper focuses on.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article (Published) |
---|---|
Refereed: | Yes |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Open access publishing; Creative Commons; Budapest Open Access Initiative; |
Subjects: | Social Sciences > Distance education Social Sciences > Education |
DCU Faculties and Centres: | Research Institutes and Centres > NIDL (National Institute for Digital Learning) |
Publisher: | Korean Council of Science Editors |
Official URL: | https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.157/ |
Copyright Information: | Copyright © 2019 Korean Council of Science Editors CC 4.0 OA |
Use License: | This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License |
ID Code: | 23048 |
Deposited On: | 07 Mar 2019 14:33 by Thomas Murtagh . Last Modified 07 Mar 2019 14:33 |
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