Since 2018, Unpaywall and then OpenAlex have described the open access status of a work with a colour: gold, green, hybrid, bronze, or closed. The labels were a pragmatic answer to a practical question (“can I read this, and where?”) and they caught on. Today they are embedded in major bibliometric databases, funder compliance dashboards, institutional reports, and national open access monitors around the world.
They have also started to crack. Earlier this year the OpenAlex Community Advisory Board convened a working group to look at the problems and recommend a way forward. The group, chaired by Juan Pablo Alperin, published its report last month:
Alperin, J.P. et al. (2026). Recommendations for Revising the Open Access Classification System in OpenAlex. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21934115
Before we further consider such significant changes to the open access classification in OpenAlex (and Unpaywall), we want to know whether the problems the working group identified match your experience, and whether the direction it proposes makes sense for the way you use open access data. This post explains both, and asks for ten minutes of your time.
What has gone wrong with the colours
The working group’s diagnosis comes down to four things.
- The colours were built for journal articles. Preprints get called green, which implies they are a copy of a publisher version that may never exist. Dissertations live in university repositories and fit nowhere. Datasets and software are rarely “published” by a publisher at all. Books can have open chapters and closed chapters in the same volume. None of this maps onto a scheme that assumes every work has a publisher version and possibly a repository copy.
- They lean on journal-level policy instead of what is true of the work. Gold is assigned because a journal is listed in DOAJ or is empirically mostly open, not because the article in front of you is open. Journals flip, get acquired, adopt subscribe-to-open, or publishers change their mind. A journal can be gold today while all of its back catalogue is closed. This also cuts against the direction the research assessment community has taken with DORA, which asks us to look at the work rather than the venue.
- They mix up access with business model. Gold tells you something about how a journal is funded and something about whether you can read the article, and it is not always clear which. Green does not say whether the repository copy carries a licence you can reuse. Bronze is a catch-all for “free to read, no idea why”, and a work can move in and out of bronze several times in a year.
- They have no sense of time. An embargoed article that opens after twelve months, or a free article that a publisher later closes, gets a single snapshot label. Anyone tracking compliance or studying how access changes over time has to work around that.
What the working group proposes
Instead of one label that tries to say everything, the report recommends describing each work along three separate dimensions:
- Access: is the work free to read, or closed?
- Location: is the free copy at the publisher, or on another platform such as a repository or preprint server?
- Licence: does the work carry an open licence, a restrictive one, or none that can be identified?
Combined, these give plain-language, work-level labels such as Publisher Open, Platform Public, or Closed that work the same way for an article, a preprint, a dataset, or a book chapter. Venue-level questions (is this an open access journal?) are left to be derived from the works themselves, or handled by a separate classification.
Just as important is what the proposal does not try to do. It says nothing about business models: APCs, diamond, hybrid agreements, subscribe-to-open, transformative agreements. The working group’s view is that business model is a property of a venue, access is a property of a work, and squashing them into one label is where much of the confusion came from. They recommend a separate effort on a venue business model taxonomy, and we agree.
The report includes a mapping from the proposed labels back to the current colours, use cases from funders, institutions, publishers, and database providers, and a discussion of transition. It is 15 pages, summarizing deliberations from thought-leaders in the space and worth reading in full.
What we are asking
This is a vibe check, not a line-by-line review. We want to know three things: does the problem resonate, does the three-dimension direction make sense, and what would you need from us to adopt it?
Fill in the form. About six questions, five minutes, any language. It stays open until Friday 13 November 2026.
Join the webinar. Tuesday 6 October 2026, 7:00 to 8:00am Pacific (10am Eastern, 3pm UK, 4pm Central Europe). Juan Pablo Alperin will present the report, and Ashley Farley (Gates Foundation, working group member) and I will join for Q&A. The recording and slides will be posted afterwards.
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NbIKwVu6Q4SI83Fv5qwXxw
Pass it on. If you know people whose reporting, policies, or reimbursement workflows depend on the colours today, please send this to them. Those are exactly the voices we most need to hear before anything changes.
What happens next
Nothing changes in the OpenAlex API or website as a result of this post. We will synthesise the responses and take them to the Community Advisory Board on 10 December 2026. If the community response supports the direction, the next phase would be implementation planning: a transition period with old and new labels available side by side, direct engagement with the databases and tools that reuse our open access data, and a separate conversation about business models. If the community does not support the proposal, we will have learned that cheaply, and we will say so.
Thanks to the working group for the report: Juan Pablo Alperin, Amélie Church, Nees Jan van Eck, Ashley Farley, Rupert Gatti, Melissa Harrison, Bianca Kramer, Christopher Marcum, Dom Mitchell, and Roberta Takenaka.
If you have any questions about this initiative more generally, send me an email at kyle@openalex.org