""" In gold open access, you write a paper and pay a big company lots of money to give it away for free. For some reason this isn't catching on.

In green open access, you publish your paper with a big company. They charge people to read it – but you make another version available for free. This has not caught on except in math and physics.

In diamond open access, you publish your paper with a journal that's free for you and free for the people who read it. This has also not caught on, because most "prestigious" journals – the ones you need to publish in to get a job – are run by companies who don't do stuff for free.

In black open access, people illegally download millions of papers and books from big companies and make them available to everyone for free. This is working great. """ - John Baez post on google-plus.

It's a great post.

https://plus.google.com/+johncbaez999/posts/Wto5MmfCP9o

Thank you. It was an embarrassingly badly written article, not to even define the basic terms.

The author is allowed to expect a certain domain knowledge. For example, an article about an advanced physics topic is not expected to explain Newton's laws.

Agreed. I should have been more clear on my criticism. If the author had the goal of convincing people beyond their existing audience then explaining their terms would have helped significantly.

They weren't trying to convince people beyond their existing audience. They're talking to the academic publishing audience, for whom these terms are quite standard.

Because when it comes down to it, "Hacker News thinks this is swell" doesn't actually matter.

There's even more distinctions: is there an embargo or not, is it gratis or libre, pay-to-publish or not, and is the full journal open? Here's an overview: https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...

That was confusing, thanks. I thought "Gold" meant "Put up a paywall and charge lots of money," "Green" meant "Put up a paywall and charge moderate amounts of money," and "Black" meant "Hoist the Jolly Roger and don't charge anything at all."

Gold means the author pays the cost of publishing, potentially several thousand dollars.

Green means "arxiv": the author uploads a "preprint" version to a website. The "official" version is in a conventional reader-pays journal.

"Black" does indeed mean sci-hub piracy.