Page 63 - Becoming Metric Wise

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Publishing in Scientific Journals

(Poynder, 2009). This is a distinction based on who provides the
access: the publisher (Gold OA) or the author (Green OA). In any
case, the terms Green and Gold OA refer to immediate OA. We come
back to this point in Subsection 3.2.6. What we have described in the
previous subsection is Gold OA. Let us now describe the so-called
Green OA.
The term Green OA refers to the following situation. Authors pub-
lish or want to publish in a subscription-access journal (otherwise we
have Gold OA). Yet, they also deposit their manuscript in a repository
or publish it in some other way online, making the content of their
work freely accessible. Basically there are three types of repositories:
institutional ones, topic-based ones, and general ones. The famous
arXiv (http://arxiv.org) started as a repository for physics articles (hence
a topic-based one), but soon expanded to include many other fields
(and hence became a general one). E-LIS (http://eprints.rclis.org)isa
repository for articles in the library and information sciences. Another
famous, free, topic-based repository is PubMed Central (http://www.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). It archives publicly accessible full-text
scholarly articles that have been published within the biomedical and
life sciences journal literature.
An institutional repository is an online set of devices for collecting,
preserving, and disseminating in digital form the intellectual output of a
research institution. They are documentary systems whose contents are
(usually) available on the Internet (exceptionally only on an Intranet,
where there is no OA), consisting of scientific documents and related
items such as articles (preprints and postprints), theses, reports, course
notes, data sets, programs, graphical material, and so on. Most of these
repositories use a common standard: the OAI (Open Archive Initiative),
see (Van de Sompel & Lagoze, 2000). The OAI technical infrastructure,
specified in the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH), now version 2.0, defines a protocol for data pro-
viders to expose their metadata. OAI standards allow a common way to
provide content, including that the content has metadata that describes
the items in unqualified Dublin Core format.
Nowadays the majority of universities and research institutes support
such repositories of scientific results obtained by their own researchers.
They often replace the older “academic bibliographies.” As such,
besides making new research public, repositories also have an archival
function.