Open access and the Green/Gold debate

Stevan Harnad’s ‘call to arms’ on SERIALST today focused squarely on the wording of the Open Access Policy Statement of the RCUK (Research Councils UK) and its perhaps unintended ambiguity.

See http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/934-Disambiguating-RCUKs-Open-Access-Policy-Statement.html for Harnad’s suggested revisions, to allow an author the choice of choosing either a Gold or Green OA option rather than only going for Green if they can’t go for Gold.

To quote Harnad:

“GOLD means the journal makes the article OA with CC-BY (“Libre OA”), usually for a fee.

GREEN means the author makes the article OA (“Gratis OA”) by depositing it in a repository, and making it OA within 0-12 months of publication”.

So is the RCUK’s statement really ‘a colossal failure’ which will cause funders and publishers alike to evaluate their position within the OA debate?  Does the ambiguous shift towards going for Gold before even considering Green mean that the Gratis OA route is under serious threat?  And should the effort being expended in the Green v Gold debate be directed toward making sure any repository embargo is 6 months or less?

Will the perceived focus on Gold OA above Green OA in the Finch report cause the whole scholarly publishing movement with regard to OA to change?

For details of current publisher policies re repositories, see RoMEO.