Gold, green and black open access

The debate about open access has until now focused on the gold (journals) versus the green route (manuscript self-archival), as the main alternatives. Recently an even more disruptive form of OA has emerged, in the form of illegal article copies retrievable from academic social networks or pirate sites. This “black open access” provides access to a large part of the pay-walled article output which cannot be found in repositories. While Black OA don’t yet threaten the revenues of major subscription publishers, its rapid emergence is a further symptom of the dysfunctionality of the current subscription system.