Image description. Ariadne icon: Link to Ariadne Home page End of image description. Image description. Doric column and link to Issue Home Page End of image description. Image description. Doric column and link to Issue Home Page End of image description. Issue 42 January 2005 Image description. Main Article End of image description. Fast-Forward on the Green Road to Open Access: The Case Against Mixing Up Green and Gold Stevan Harnad provides a summary of his critique of Jean-Claude Guédon's article on the green and gold roads to Open Access. Image description. Main Contents End of image description. Image description. Section Menu End of image description. Image description. Email Ariadne End of image description. Image description. Search Ariadne End of image description. Image description. dividing bar End of image description. Introduction This article is a critique of: The "Green" and "Gold" Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching by Jean-Claude Guédon [1]. Open Access (OA) means: free online access to all peer-reviewed journal articles. Jean-Claude Guédon (J-CG) argues against the efficacy of author self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles -- the "Green" road to OA -- on the grounds (1) that far too few authors self-archive, (2) that self-archiving can only generate incomplete and inconvenient access, and (3) that maximizing access and impact is the wrong reason for seeking OA (and only favours elite authors). J-CG suggests instead that the right reason for seeking OA is so as to reform both the peer review system and the journal publishing system by creating new ways of "creating value" and "branding" whilst converting to OA ("Gold") publishing (in which the online version of all articles is free to all users). We should convert to Gold by "mixing and matching" Green and Gold as follows: First, self-archive dissertations (not published, peer-reviewed journal articles). Second, identify and tag how those dissertations have been evaluated and reviewed. Third, self-archive unrefereed preprints (not published, peer-reviewed journal articles). Fourth, develop new mechanisms for evaluating and reviewing those unrefereed preprints, at multiple levels. The result will be OA Publishing (Gold). I reply that this is not mixing and matching but merely imagining: a rather vague conjecture about how to convert to 100% Gold, involving no real Green at all along the way, because Green is the self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed articles, not just dissertations and preprints. I argue that rather than yet another 10 years of speculation [2] what is actually needed (and imminent) is for OA self-archiving to be mandated by research funders and institutions so that the self-archiving of published, peer-reviewed journal articles (Green) can be fast-forwarded to 100% OA. The direct purpose of OA is to maximise research access and impact, not to reform peer review or journal publishing; and OA's direct benefits are not just for elite authors but for all researchers, for their institutions, for their funders, for the tax-payers who fund their funders, and for the progress and productivity of research itself. There is a complementarity between the Green and Gold strategies for reaching 100% OA today, just as there is a complementarity between access to the OA and non-OA versions of the same non-OA articles today. Whether 100% Green OA will or will not eventually lead to 100% Gold, however, is a hypothetical question that is best deferred until we have first reached 100% OA, which is a direct, practical, reachable and far more urgent immediate goal - and the optimal, inevitable and natural outcome for research in the PostGutenberg Galaxy. "Recent discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes" From the day it was coined in 2001 by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), [3] "Open Access" has always been defined as free online access, reachable by two distinct routes, BOAI-1, OA self-archiving ("Green") and BOAI-2, OA journals ("Gold"): created using Corda Builder