Tutorial 19c: Open Access Definitions And Clarifications, Part 3: A Brief Note On Platinum/Diamond

As we saw last time, the appeal of the Gold route to open access is that the publisher does the work of making the article freely available in an obvious, well-known place in its final typeset format. Conversely the appeal of the Green route is that it doesn’t cost the author or her institution any money.

What happens when we combine these two advantages, and get publishers to typeset, publish and archive open-access articles at no charge?

Yes, it does happen. One outstanding journal that does this is Acta Palaeontologia Polonica — this is one of the reasons that I have published there twice (neck posture, Brontomerus) and Matt has three other APP papers as well as being co-author on those two. Another is Palaeontologia Electronica. In a different field, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) is of particular interest because the article An Efficient Journal explains in some detail how it’s done.