GOAL’s stated aim is to support and develop Green Open Access in the long term. In practice, this short statement means a wide range of different actions and activities. The first thing that comes to mind is negotiating Green Open Access policies with publishers. This is a key action, but there is more to it than that when it comes to fully supporting Green Open Access.
Another very important action is to create a register of all journals with a Green Open Access policy and make it available to others. The easier it is to find journals and their policies, the better Green Open Access can work. Librarians and authors can quickly find out which journals have a policy, what it says and where it can be found on the publisher’s website. Such a registry recognizes the efforts that publishers have made towards Green Open Access and gives them greater visibility. It also gives them the opportunity to compare policies and develop their own.
Internationally there already exist such registries such as Sherpa/Romeo. Useful as they are, the thresholds they put to include journals in their registries are primarily thought for scholarly journals. As the logics behind scholarly and practice-oriented journals differ, this represents a hurdle for the latter and impedes their inclusion in the registry. An alternative solution reflecting the reality of professional, practice-oriented publications is thus necessary.
We in GOAL are committed to create such a register. We already have published the first results of our negotiations in our results page.
The register is central to our work, but our work does not end with the publication and curation of the register. We want to make it easy to search and find the results. So, we are currently developing a database that will hold all the information about the journals and their policies. We are currently testing a basic prototype with some features. The two images closing this post give an idea of how part of the prototype looks like and how our database might look like in the coming future.
It will take a bit to make the software-based database public on the Internet. Until then, we will regularly update the published register. Do not forget to visit us regularly!
