OpenAlex asks whether open access colours should be retired

The system of using colour labels to denote the open access status of a piece of research has “started to crack,” OpenAlex has said – the open access bibliographic database is consulting its community on whether to move away from the use of colours.

The database’s community advisory board has recommended that the current system – the clear-cut classification of a work’s status as gold, green, hybrid, bronze, or closed – be replaced by a classification framework based on three dimensions:

• access: whether the work is freely available to read
• location: whether the work is available at the publisher, or whether it appears on another platform such as a repository or a preprint server
• licence: whether open, closed/restrictive, or no clearly identifiable label.

Combining the three criteria will give “plain language, work-level” labels which will work across all formats, from articles to preprints to datasets. One of the issues that the group has identified with the colour system is that it “struggles with diverse research outputs,” for example by historically treating preprints as a green version of a journal publication, despite them being increasingly used as final outputs.

Other problems with the current system are said to be an “overreliance on journal-level policies” as opposed to work-level labels – a particular issue when journals changes their OA policies, and also in tension with DORA’s move to classifying individual works. The use of colour labels is also found to “mix up access with business model”, telling the audience about how journals are funded, rather than definitively describing access and reuse arrangements.

The community survey – described as a “vibe check, not a line-by-line review” – is open until 13 November.

Open access across Europe

Elsewhere, the European Commission has published an independent report on open access policies in EU member states and elsewhere in the world.

It finds that – despite an undeniable trend towards open access across Europe – there continue to be substantial differences between countries in the details: scope of coverage, embargo periods, copyright, repository requirements, funding models, and monitoring arrangements. This creates “complexity for researchers, institutions and funders, especially in cross-border collaboration.”

The report also concludes that OA frameworks based on the use of multiple, complementary approaches outperform attempts to incentivise open access which are based on one single approach. It finds that OA uptake is higher where there is mutual reinforcement between national legislation, funder mandates, and institutional-level support.

A comparative section on open access policies in the UK summarises developments over the last two decades, observing that such policy has developed “incrementally” and is driven more by research funders, in particular UKRI and Wellcome, than by legislation.