The green route is self-archiving or deposit by the author in an open archive, such as arXiv or HAL. Since the Law for a Digital Republic of 2016, an author in France has the right to deposit the accepted version of his or her manuscript there, respecting an embargo period that is capped at 6 months for science, technology and medicine and 12 months for the humanities and social sciences. The deposit improves the researcher's visibility and the citation of work, while guaranteeing authorship. It is possible to apply a Creative Commons license to specify, for example, that all commercial re-use is forbidden.
Within the golden path, the main economic model that stands out is the author-pays model: access to the document is free for the reader, but the author or his institution pays a fee called Article processing charges (APC ) to finance the publication.
However, the author must be careful
- Faced with possible pricing and editorial abuses (lack of scientific committee and/or peer review process) by certain publishers
- Faced with hybrid journals: The Open Science Committee formally advises researchers and institutions against paying additional fees in a subscription-based journal and asks that they not support this double-dipping model.
It enables scientists to publish in open access, free of charge, while retaining their copyright. Journals and platforms are funded upstream by a donor, a university, a non-profit organization or generate their revenues through the freemium (free basic service and additional paid services : PDF, ePub etc.).