Golden Road to Open Access: Generic reply to generic query

Anonymous query: "Sorry for my ignorance. But is it possible to speak about  the golden road to open access and whether any institutions have taken up that road at all?"

The golden road to Open Access (OA) is to publish in Gold OA journals (free for the user online).

The green road to OA is to publish in conventional (non-OA) journals and to make the articles OA (free for the user online) by self-archiving them in the author's institutional repository.

About 20% of journals (but not the top 20%) are Gold OA journals.

Institutions and funders can mandate (require) Green OA self-archiving, but they cannot mandate Gold OA publishing. 

(They can neither require 80% publishers to be Gold OA nor can they require their researchers to publish in 20% Gold OA journals and not in 80% non-OA journals. There is also little or no extra institutional money to pay for Gold OA publication fees while the institutions' potential funds are still being spent on their annual journal subscriptions.)

Mandating Green OA can provide 100% OA (Green OA) with certainty.

Once it is universally mandated, 100% Green OA will probably (but not with certainty) lead to institutional subscription cancelations, making subscriptions no longer sustainable as the way of covering the remaining costs of publication.  If/when that comes to pass, journals will convert to Gold OA, and the Gold OA publication fees will be paid out of the institutional windfall subscription cancelation savings.
 
See:

http://www.openscholarship.org/

http://roarmap.eprints.org/

Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green. Open Access Self-Archiving. Logos 

Sale, A., Couture, M., Rodrigues, E., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2011, in press) Open Access Mandates and the "Fair Dealing" Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.)

Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus 28 (1): 55-59. 

Harnad, S. (2010) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. In Parycek, P. & Prosser, A. (Eds.): EDEM2010: Proceedings of the 4th Inernational Conference on E-Democracy. Austrian Computer Society, 13-22

Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8). 

Harnad, S. (2009) The PostGutenberg Open Access Journal. In: Cope, B. & Phillips, A (Eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal. Chandos. 

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus.