Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, March 14, 2009

Gold OA support should follow green OA mandates

Stevan Harnad, Scaling to Global OA: Parallel Local Green/Gold Is OK, But Gold Alone First, No Way, Open Access Archivangelism, March 14, 2009.

Summary:  Trying to morph incoming institutional non-OA journal-fleet subscriptions into outgoing institutional Gold OA journal-fleet "memberships" is incoherent and cannot scale across journals and institutions; alongside an institutional Green OA mandate, however, it is innocuous: The Green mandates will ensure the real, scalable, unstoppable progress toward global OA. Without an institutional Green OA mandate, pursuing local Gold OA "memberships" is not only futile but a retardant on real progress toward global OA, creating instead an illusory local sense of progress that further distracts from and obscures what really needs to be done locally to generate global OA.