Ancora su Open Archives ed Open Access: tra "golden road" e "green road", lo scenario permane… grigio. (Pubblicato come: Open Archives e Open Access tra "golden road" e "green road": lo scenario permane… grigio)

Even though there is a large and intense debate on open access nowadays in process, the Open Access strategy is still characterized by some ambiguities. First of all, we have to make a basic distinction between the neutral and technical meaning of Open (which means interoperable and it is assured by protocols and standards) and the substantial meaning of the whole expression meaning freedom of access to scholarly literature without any barrier, above all the removal of economic barriers. It is obvious that the second definition is a consequence of the first, but the scholarly and scientific environment should be interested in the opportunity to have free and open access to scientific documents both theoretically and practically! As a consequence, when we use the expressions “Open Access” or “Open Archives” we refer to the second meaning. It is important to take into account this basic distinction: assuring the accessibility to materials through protocols and standards (for example, OAI-PMH, Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) is not the same thing of assuring open access to scholarly production because the you have to pay for the standards and protocols used by commercial publishers to provide access to their sources. In brief, the interoperability of the archives doesn’t imply necessarily the open access to their contents. There is ambiguity also in the strategies to assure open access to scholarly publications ( that is the second meaning of the definition). As a matter of fact, often the strategy called “golden road” (based on journals) and the one called “green road” (based on self-archiving repositories) have been united and assimilated. Actually, it is true that these strategies are complementary but we have to point out that their presuppositions, aims and ways are different