good idea in principle, there are a number of remaining real-world challenges to be overcome if it is to become the norm. Advocates of open access strive to work around these problems (or, on occasion, deny that the difficulties exist), while sceptics wonder whether the potential disruption is worth the claimed benefits (or whether these hurdles are insurmountable).
Furthermore, the danger of this political minefield is intensified by the fact that open access is a treacherous territory for the newcomer, despite the fundamental simplicity of the concept. As with many other aspects of policy, so it is also with OA: it can appear to the paranoid as though there might be a conspiracy to make the subject so dull and laden with jargon that people are unable to pay attention. Likewise, though, as it is with almost all policy elements that seem tedious and terminologically dense, to ignore these changes would be a catastrophic mistake for anybody who works within a university and a research context. In this light, in order to make this engagement as pain-free as possible, I will try to use as few jargon terms as possible throughout this book. However, there are certain base elements that are so taken for granted when thinking about open access that they are worth unravelling from the outset.
a brief glossary of and introduction to open access
While a more extensive glossary is available at the end of this book, by this point we already have definitions for ‘open access’ (the removal of price and permission barriers to research) and the titlecase ‘Open Access’ (the movement to make this happen). There are, however, several ways in which open access can be implemented, each with its own terminology.
Gold open access is the most well known, but sometimes most sceptically viewed, of these ‘flavours’. Gold open access refers to research being made available for free in its full, original form in the journal where it was published (or, in the case of a book, being made freely available by the publisher). Gold open access journals can either be entirely open access, or they can be ‘hybrid’, in which subscription publications carry a subset of articles that are free for all to read. For readers who encounter a gold open access article in a
