Open Access strategies
There are two complementary roads to Open Access (OA): the golden road and the green road. A third road, the grey road, is also discussed in this section.
The golden road
The golden road refers to the primary publication of scholarly and scientific articles in Open Access journals. (In principle, it also refers to the OA publication of other original contributions such as monographs, collective volumes etc.) Typically, these texts go through the same quality assurance process – usually peer review – as texts submitted to print journals. As a rule, the author enters into a publishing agreement with the publishers which sets out the rights of use which the author grants to the publishers and the conditions of re-use of the openly accessible documents. Such agreements are often supplemented by an OA publishing licence under which the author may grant users more far-reaching and exactly specified rights.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides an overview of the approximately 4,270 peer-reviewed OA journals in existence as of July 2009. In addition, the Web portal Journal Info provides information on all types of journal including details of reader accessibility and cost as well as quality indicators.
Like traditional publications, OA publications have to be financed. In the case of OA publications, revenue sources differ to a certain extent from those of traditional publications. For example, some OA publishers charge publication fees which are payable by the authors (author fees) or their institution (institutional fees). Most OA journals also offer a print-on-demand service.
The green road
The green road to OA refers to the self-archiving of digital documents in an openly accessible institutional or subject-based server either in parallel with or after publication in a toll-access journal etc. or retrospectively. Self-archived texts mainly include preprints and postprints. However, archive content also comprises monographs, research reports, conference proceedings etc.
A preprint is the version of the manuscript which the author submits for consideration to a journal etc. In other words, the preprint has not yet been peer-reviewed and recommended for publication. As a rule, the copyright is still held by the author at this stage, so that there are usually no legal barriers to self-archiving preprints.
A postprint is the peer-reviewed version of a manuscript which has been accepted for publication. The postprint has more or less the same content as the publisher's version (i.e. the published document) but the two are not identical: on the one hand the formatting in the postprint can deviate from that of the publisher's version; on the other hand, the postprint has not yet been proof-read by the publisher. Hence the postprint may contain typing errors or wording which deviates from that of the publisher's version. Journals and publishers differ considerably with regard to their willingness to allow postprints to be self-archived. Hence legal problems can arise. The SHERPA/RoMEO listings provide information on publishers which permit self-archiving.
In the OA discussion on self-archiving, a distinction is made between two types of archive. Firstly, documents can be made openly accessible in institutional repositories which are multi-disciplinary document servers operated by institutions such as universities. The second option is to self-archive in subject-based repositories which make scientific and scholarly material of an individual discipline, or related disciplines, available irrespective of the institution to which the author belongs. A third variation of self-archiving is for authors to make their work available on their own personal websites (self-posting). However, the disadvantage of this option is that the documents do not have the same visibility as in the case of self-archiving in institutional or subject-based repositories.
A list of OA repositories can be found at OpenDOAR and in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
The grey road
The term grey literature covers a range of materials which are not distributed through conventional channels such as publishers and booksellers. The grey road refers to making grey literature openly accessible. In contrast to the golden road and the green road, the grey road entails making documents available online free of charge without the involvement of publishers and journals and it is not accompanied by concomitant or retrospective publication by a publisher or a journal.
Whether the grey road actually constitutes a separate OA strategy or whether it is a variation of the green or golden road is debatable, as is the question of whether the provision of free online access to grey literature constitutes OA at all (see Stevan Harnad 2006).
If one accepts that there are three strategies, then dissertations which are made publicly available online - as a rule via institutional repositories - can be considered an example of the grey road. The practice of depositing preprints of scientific and scholarly output in subject-specific repositories which dates back to the early days of the Internet can also be considered an example of the grey road. Despite the print in preprint, a large number of these preprints are never published elsewhere. Even though individual preprints bear all the hallmarks of discussion papers, this is not the case for preprints in general. Most of them represent a sui generis way of publicising work which is also characterised by a high degree of autonomy. One example which attracted worldwide attention is the proof of Poincaré's conjecture furnished by the Russian mathematician Perelman which was first publicised in the preprint archive ArXiv.org. In 2006 Perelman was awarded the Fields medal for his achievement.
