I unfortunately wasn’t able to hear the talk on Thursday and am looking forward to it being posted online.  So, as I browsed some blogs and did some basic research beyond the PhD comics video, I’m still struggling to really frame what questions I have about Open Access.  I generally understand it I think… and I’m a huge fan of disrupting paradigms where an elite few have access to information that should be or could be more public… but I think I’m fuzzy on specific details of how it works in the actual publishing process.

To try to start diving into it, I looked into one of the journals in my field where I hope to submit an article.  It is called the Educational Psychologist — it is apparently a hybrid open access journal with gold open access option.  The site says the charge is $2950 – I assume that means for the gold option where it becomes free to anyone who browses that particular article from the publisher’s website?  And I also assume (?) that this is the kind of charge that the library (and others) are offering to subsidize to increase awareness of open access? If VT supported up to $1500 (max VT support per article according to the website), I guess the other $1500 would need to come from the author… from departmental funds?… or (more likely) from a funding agency if there was one.

What is also unclear to me is if the “green option” is in any way standard (read: free).  My understanding of the green option is that I could post this through VTechWorks which would allow open access to a pdf version of the article from the journal but that version could be accessed only via VT, posting on a personal webpage, etc.  This would mean that the article is “open” but maybe harder to stumble upon(?)

Anyone want to correct me or explain it differently if you understand the process better?  Thanks!