Gold journals use various business models and are in no way limited to the author-institution charge mentioned below. A good counter-example is Scielo (http://www.scielo.org) where the journals are simply and directly subsidized by governmental money on a macro scale, and not on a per-article basis.
Jean-Claude Guédon Le lundi 11 avril 2005 à 13:06 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit : > Below is a comment on an article in Wired entitled > "Open-Access Journals Flourish" (by Randy Dotinga) > http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67174,00.html?tw=wn_2culthead > which (as usual) described only the "gold rush" and completely > overlooked the quiet growth of green: > > There are two roads to Open Access (i.e., free online access to > peer-reviewed journal articles), one of them being the "golden" road > of publishing the articles in "gold" journals that give away their > own contents for free online by charging the author-institution for > publication instead of charging the user-institution for access. Your > article rightly points out that about 5% of journals (about 1500 out > of a total of about 24,000) are already gold today. What it did not > mention was that about 92% of journals are already "green", that is, > they give their own authors the green light to make their own articles > Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them in their own institution's Open > Access Archives. Of the 2.5 million articles published annually today, 5% > are OA via gold and 15% are OA via green. The exact comparative growth > rate of Gold vs. Green OA is not yet known, but it is far easier and > cheaper for an institution to create an OA archive for its own research > than it is to create a new gold journal (or to convert an established > journal or publisher to gold), especially with more and more research > institutions, universities, research funders and governments recommending, > requesting and even requiring that the peer-reviewed research articles > they produce and fund should be made accessible to all their would-be > users online and not just to those whose institutions that can afford > to subscribe to the journals in which they were published. > > Here are a few URLs that fill in the relative gold and green portions of the > picture that your Wired Story wrongly portrayed as a unilateral "Gold Rush": > > Directory of OA ("Gold") Journals (1525/24,000): > http://www.doaj.org/ > Directory of Green Journal Policies (7753/8427): > http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php > Number and Growth Rate of Institutional OA Archives: > http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse > Policy Recommendation of UK Select Committee: > > http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm > Policy Recommendation of Berlin Declaration: > http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/outcomes.html > Registry of Institutional Self-Archiving Policies: > http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php > OA Self-Archiving FAQ: > http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ > Bibliography on how maximizing research access maximizes research impact: > http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html > American Scientist Open Access Forum: > > http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html > > Stevan Harnad > Moderator, American Scientist Open Access Forum > Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Université du Québec à Montréal > Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of Southampton, UK