Bronze and Delayed Open Access: What can we do about these? | A Way of Happening

"The part that of this paper that really stuck with me though was the labeling of the Bronze Open Access category and the fact that it makes up the largest amount of open access publications. 17.6% of all articles in 2015. Compared to 11.3% Gold, 9.4% Hybrid, and 6.3% Green.

Bronze OA is defined here as articles that are 'free to read on the publisher page, but without a license' (i.e. an open license like creative commons), but also later as 'not published in journals listed as OA in the DOAJ'. Now, these two definitions don’t overlap perfectly. For example, it’s possible that a journal has an open licence but is not indexed in DOAJ (The reverse can’t be true since DOAJ requires an open licence). However, I can only think of one example of a journal like this…. and it was just accepted to DOAJ, so it no longer counts. So can work with this definition of Bronze for now. Examples of exceptions will be few and this paper is still a preprint!

It looks like Bronze OA is made up of these further subcategories:

• Delayed OA journals
• Open editorial content
• One-off articles or issues made open by journals
• Non-DOAJ indexed journals – 'Hidden Gold' journals

It’s nice to see Delayed OA journals get categorized. They weren’t addressed in the original Green/Gold distinction, which has resulted in some confusion especially my own."