Open Access and the yellow brick road

Abstract

There are two ways of implementing Open Access (OA): „green open access” or „gold open access” (the former means archiving in a repository, the latter making it immediately available by the publisher). It is a controversial issue which way is more easily viable: open access publishing may seem more efficient, while placing in a repository – more easily practicable (considering the opposition of business-oriented publishers). In practice, both ways are in use, although the number of articles published in repositories in the first decade of the 21st century was much higher than that published as open access (Gargouri et al., 2012). Some studies suggest that in the past ten years open access publishing increased faster than repositories (Archambault et al., 2014). According to the OUTSELL report, the number of open access journals increased by 39% from 2013 to 2014, the growth rate with hybrid journals made up 9%, while in case of pure subscription journals a decrease of 14% was experienced. In 2014 when 14 publishers were surveyed – including the biggest ones: Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley – the number of pure open access journals exceeded 1500, i.e. 13% of all journals published (OUTSELL, 2015). The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) contained in 2014 about 10 000 titles (Olijhoek et al., 2015). This difference in scale is due to the large number of indie (small, independent, published by institutions) journals. The main challenges faced by open access journals are related to operating „peer review” and to attracting authors. The threshold of starting new journals is fairly low from the technological and financial points, because a choice of free software – such as Open Journal Systems, OJS – is available.