Editorial commentary
Green open access is a route to making a publication freely readable that runs in parallel to the journal’s own platform: rather than (or in addition to) the publisher making the article open on its own site, the author deposits a version of the work in an institutional or subject repository — typically one compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), so the deposit can be indexed and discovered alongside deposits from other repositories. The deposited version is most commonly the author accepted manuscript (the peer-reviewed, revised text before the publisher’s own copy-editing and typesetting) rather than the publisher’s final version of record, though the exact permitted version and any embargo period are set by the specific publisher or journal policy, not by the author.
This is what distinguishes green from gold open access: gold OA makes the publisher’s own version openly available directly on the journal’s platform, usually funded by an article processing charge; green OA instead relies on self-archiving a permitted version elsewhere, and is typically free to the author, though it may be delayed by a publisher-imposed embargo period before the repository copy can be made public.
Where to check the applicable policy
Because green OA terms — which version may be deposited, how long any embargo lasts, and what licence applies — vary by publisher and even by individual journal, they must be checked against the specific policy rather than assumed. The Open Policy Finder service (the successor to the SHERPA/RoMEO database) aggregates these publisher and funder self-archiving policies in one searchable place; see CASRAI's guides to self-archiving and green open access and to Open Policy Finder for the end-to-end deposit workflow and the tool itself, respectively.
References
- Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) specification, openarchives.org.
Also known as
Secondary open access · self-archiving
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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