Green Open Access

SDG4: Quality Education - Learning Resouce supports the SDGs - UN-Guidelines - see SDG-Tagging.

Green open access - Green OA, is the practice of placing a version of an author’s manuscript into a repository, making it freely accessible for the scientific community.

The primary motivation of Open Access was

• to provide Open Access to Knowledge to the READER of Publications and
• to allow Open Access to AUTHORS Publication (unbiased publication of Knowledge)

Green Open Access vs. Commercial Open Access Strategies

Commercial Gold Open Access

Commercial Publishers need to create profit for the company, so it necessary to charge someone in the educational and academic institutions for the publications:

• (charge reader) charge either the Reader of publications,
• (charge authors)the authors of publications by publication fees (e.g in commercial Gold Open Access),
• (charge institutions)or the Institutions, the authors works for.

Publishing Costs for Educational System in Commercial Settings

• Universities or organisations have to pay for the scientist for creating a publication,
• Universities have to pay for scientist for peer-reviewing and
• when the paper is published the Universities have to pay for Journals in a classical setting or for Gold Standard Open Access Publication.

Green Open Access in Wikiversity

• papers developed in Wikiversity have by default a transparent versioning (i.e. readers of the paper can access the version history and can identify who contributed, when, what, ...)
• Green Open Access includes a step of self-archiving of a paper release (e.g. on public accessible repository, where the scientific community has not write-access).
• includes an optional step of external quality assurance (if nobody performed an external quality assurance, this is visible for the user), quality assurance could finalize the assessment with
  • no errors found,
  • errors found and corrected,
  • discussion added to paper, where improvements could be performed
• The activity on the peer-reviewing side defines the scientific interest in the paper.
• release management of authors: the authors can create releases of the paper and make these release accessible to the scientific community

History of Green OA in the Context of AT6FUI

This approach to Green Open Access is based of the Open Community Approach introduced to Action Team 6 Follow-Up Initiative AT6FUI in 2012. The main purpose of Green Open Access is to introduce scientific results as decision support product. Image you have a scientific result that is constantly updated with new data.

A classical paper must be evaluated by scientist or engineers that include the new results into a Decision Support System. A dynamic paper management create constantly statiscal and/or numerical assessment of the data. The green open access creates a dynamic report of the updated input data (e.g. sensor data, financial data, ...). The new data could have an impact the statistical significance of a scientific result (e.g. medical drug has show good success rates for treating a disease, by an constant update of anonymous patient data the benefit of the drug is not clear anymore). A decision support system could be linked to such dynamic digital paper and decision support is update as well the new results are quality assured by a digital signature of an institution e.g. WHO. Such a dynamic paper generation could be realized with Knitr.

The pages on AT6FUI website are published under Creative Commons, so that this documents can be build on those recommendations and results.

Role of Reviewers

A peer-reviewing process is used for quality assurance. If reviewers provide feedback to the authors they

• rate a publication as ready for publication
• suggest orthographic or grammar improvements,
• highlight missing scientific results, that should be included in the publication,
• identify missing information about the methodology so that the results are reproducible for other scientist,
• logical, methodological, ... errors,
• ...

Public-Private-Versioning and Open Access

Trust in a reviewing process is create by community of reviewers that perform the reviewing. In an Open Community Approach the strict separation of Reviewers and Authors is not there. Review is regarded as a contribution to the evolution of the paper. A reviewer becomes an author can take over the reviewer role during a quality assurance process. The concept of public-private-versioning can be used to create institutional private version in a development branches. Private versions can be regarded as releases (major version) of a document in the private branch. The evolution of a publication is not finished with the publication, it evolves with new scientific results. Who created what, when is transparently documented in a version control system. The reader can track, if the author provided major contributions to paper development or just removed typos and altered the wording.

Learning Tasks

• (Cite Wikiversity/Wikipedia) Learn how to cite a wikipedia or wikiversity resource by using the "Cite this page" menu item.
• (WikiJournal of Medicine) Explore the WikiJournal of Medicine in Wikiversity.
  • What are the elements of Green Open Access that you identify in the Journal?
  • How is the quality assurance implemented in the journal?
  • Compare these concepts with Public-Private-Versioning and describe similarities and differences in the approach.
• (WikiJournal of Science) Explore the scope of the Journal and identify and analyse the peer-reviewing concept!
• (Open Community Approach) Consider the following two options:
  • you can regard knowledge as a commercial product, that can be sold or
  • you can donate knowledge to the community as common good, on which the build on, access it, modify it and intergrate the common good into the problem solving strategy of the commuity.

Does Green Open Access contribute to that concept and how?

• (Who did when what why) Transparent evolution of a scientific paper allows authors to publish not only the final result of the paper but also the intermediate steps on transparent way. Open Access combined with evolution of the paper will be visible to other authors as a learning resource. The key principle of transparent levels of paper evolution can be described by open access to information about "Who did when what why". Would you prefer to publish all intermediate steps of just the main steps of the paper development of just the final result of the paper? What can other Master students and/or PhD students learn from an evolutionary process of the paper development and from the access to the feedback of supervisor for the students?

See also

• Wikipedia:Peer review
• Spatial Risk Management
• Version Control/Public-Private-Versioning
• Digital Signature for validation of origine of publications.
• Trust: Improve trust in Green Open Access publication and peer-reviewing.
• Community of Practice: Space and Global Health
• Open Educational Resources
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Open Community Approach