Re: Green OA Impact Advantage

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Sandy Thatcher
<sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:

> I'm not familiar with the term "Gray." Is that the same as 
"hybrid"?

No. There are three kinds of journals, insofar as OA is 
concerned:

(1) GOLD journals are OA journals: they make all their articles 
free online immediately upon publication

(2) GREEN journals endorse their authors' making all their 
articles free online immediately upon publication (hence all GOLD 
journals are also a-fortiori GREEN journals!)

(3) GRAY journals are neither GOLD nor GREEN (i.e., they do not 
make all their articles free online immediately upon publication 
and they do not endorse their authors' making their articles free 
online immediately upon publication)

The GREEN color-code originates from the original Romeo Project, 
and the scheme is used by EPrints Romeo (which is just a re-coded 
version of SHERPA Romeo, the primary data-source).

SHERPA Romeo uses another code, with a great excess of 
superfluous colours -- green, blue, yellow, white -- solemnly 
codifying publisher policy distinctions that are just confusing 
and unnecessary: http://bit.ly/romeo-coding

SHERPA-green and SHERPA-blue are both GREEN SHERPA-white is GRAY 
SHERPA-yellow could be called "pale-green": it is the code for 
publishers that endorse their authors' making their unrefereed 
drafts rather than their refereed draft immediately free online.

Hybrid GOLD is just that: A journal that offers GOLD for those 
authors who pay for it, and not for those who don't. (Many -- but 
by no means all -- hybrid-GOLD journals are GREEN for their 
non-GOLD articles.)

By the way, there is no such thing as "Temporary" or "Delayed" or 
"Partial" GREEN. Those journals are classified as GRAY.

And, as noted, there is a persistent confusion about "Green" at 
the journal vs. the article level (largely because of the 
persistent error of thinking that "OA" only means Gold-OA 
journals).

At the journal level "GREEN" means that immediate OA 
self-archiving of the refereed draft, by the author, is formally 
endorsed by the journal. But it does not mean that authors are 
actually doing it! (That's why Green OA self-archiving mandates 
are needed.)

"Green OA," used loosely, at the journal level, means articles 
that are free online, usually because the author has made them 
free online (but it is vague about when and where the author made 
the article free online: it might have been long after 
publication, and it might have been a Gold OA journal article 
imported automatically into the author's institutional 
repository).

In studies on the OA citation advantage, it is crucial to compare 
like with like: OA versus non-OA articles within the same journal 
and same year. This means no Gold OA articles. Harder to control 
is the date when an article was made OA (but this works against 
the OA advantage, making it an underestimate for those articles 
that were made OA long after publication.)

Stevan Harnad