Bronze, free, or fourrée: an open access commentary

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