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Stevan Harnad Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science, University of Quebec/Montreal, Founder of CogPrints Eprint Archive, and Eprints Self-Archiving Initiative, Southampton University
The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access to Refereed Research
The problem of journal pricing/affordability and the problem of article access/impact are not the same problem, the solution to the one is not the solution to the other, and it is a great mistake to treat them as if they were the same. The solution to the journal pricing/affordability problem is lower journal prices and/or a conversion to "golden" journal publishing (Open Access [OA] Journals whose articles are free to all user online):
 http://www.doaj.org/
The solution to the access/impact problem is for authors to provide Open Access to all their journal articles in order to maximize their usage and impact, either by publishing them in OA journals or by publishing them in conventional journals but also self-archiving them on their institutional OA websites (preferably OAI-compliant Eprint Archives for visibility and interoperability):
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php
Over 80% of journals are already "green," i.e., they have given their official green light to author self-archiving:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html
But only 5% of journals are gold (i.e., OA journals). It takes far more time, effort, resources and risk to create or convert gold journals, whereas it takes virtually no time, effort, resources or risk to create and fill OA Archives. Several studies have now confirmed the dramatic degree to which OA enhances research impact:
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html
It is now time for institutions to adopt official policies requiring all their researchers to provide OA to all their research articles, via either the gold or green road:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
What is holding this up is partly author/institution inertia but partly also an unfortunate tendency to conflate the article access/impact problem with the journal pricing/affordability problem, and hence to focus solely or mainly on the slow, narrow and uncertain golden road (5%) to OA, rather than the fast, wide, and certain green road (95%).
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