The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access. Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallières, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y., Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. R. 30(4):310–314.
The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users; hence, they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA; i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the ” golden” road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the ” green” road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). Only 5\,% of journals are gold, but over 90\,% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10-20\,% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100\,% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as the United Kingdom and the United States have recently recommended, and universities need to implement that mandate.
@article{harnadAccessImpactProblem2004,
  title = {The {{Access}}/{{Impact Problem}} and the {{Green}} and {{Gold Roads}} to {{Open Access}}},
  author = {Harnad, Stevan and Brody, Tim and Vallières, François and Carr, Les and Hitchcock, Steve and Gingras, Yves and Oppenheim, Charles and Stamerjohanns, Heinrich and Hilf, Eberhard R.},
  date = {2004-01},
  journaltitle = {Serials Review},
  volume = {30},
  pages = {310--314},
  issn = {0098-7913},
  doi = {10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.013},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2004.09.013},
  abstract = {The research access/impact problem arises because journal articles are not accessible to all of their would-be users; hence, they are losing potential research impact. The solution is to make all articles Open Access (OA; i.e., accessible online, free for all). OA articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-OA articles. There are two roads to OA: the ” golden” road (publish your article in an OA journal) and the ” green” road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it in an OA archive). Only 5\,\% of journals are gold, but over 90\,\% are already green (i.e., they have given their authors the green light to self-archive); yet only about 10-20\,\% of articles have been self-archived. To reach 100\,\% OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' employers and funders, as the United Kingdom and the United States have recently recommended, and universities need to implement that mandate.},
  keywords = {*imported-from-citeulike-INRMM,~INRMM-MiD:c-72145,free-access,green-open-access,open-access,scientific-communication},
  number = {4}
}

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