Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A subscription publisher removes the paywall from an article after an embargo lapses, without adding a Creative Commons license or DOAJ-indexed OA status.
- Is an instance
A publisher makes older back-issue content freely viewable as a legacy-access policy, without formal re-licensing — free to read, but not formally reusable.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An article published under a CC BY license in a DOAJ-indexed journal is Gold OA, not Bronze, because reuse rights are explicit and durable.
- Not an instance
An author-deposited manuscript in an institutional repository is Green OA, defined by repository deposit rather than publisher-site free-to-read status.
Editorial commentary
Bronze open access describes a journal article that is free to read on the publisher’s own website, but carries no explicit open license (such as a Creative Commons license) and is not published in a journal indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Because there is no license or contractual commitment attached, the free-to-read status is granted at the publisher’s discretion and can be withdrawn, paywalled, or altered at any time — the defining feature that separates Bronze from every other open access colour.
Operational definition
An article qualifies as Bronze OA when all three of the following are true: (1) the full text is currently free to read on the publisher’s own platform, (2) no open license (CC BY, CC BY-NC, etc.) is displayed or attached to the article, and (3) the journal itself is not a fully open-access, DOAJ-indexed title. If a license is present, the article is Gold or hybrid OA instead. If free-to-read access depends on a repository deposit rather than the publisher’s own site, it is Green OA. If neither reader nor author ever pays and the journal itself is fully open, it is Diamond OA.
Worked examples
- A subscription publisher removes the paywall from an article after an embargo period lapses, or as a promotional or goodwill gesture, without adding a Creative Commons license or listing the journal in DOAJ. The article is free to read today, but the publisher could reinstate the paywall later — that is Bronze OA.
- A publisher makes older back-issue content freely viewable on its site as part of a legacy-access or ‘moving wall’ policy, again without formal re-licensing. Readers can view it, but cannot legally redistribute or reuse it beyond fair use/fair dealing — also Bronze OA.
Counter-examples
- An article published under a CC BY license in a DOAJ-indexed journal is Gold OA, not Bronze — the reuse rights are explicit and the free-to-read status does not depend on publisher discretion.
- An author-deposited accepted manuscript sitting in an institutional or subject repository is Green OA, defined by where the copy lives (a repository) rather than by the publisher’s own site being temporarily unlocked.
Why the distinction matters
Bronze OA is easy to overlook because, from a reader’s perspective in the moment, it looks identical to Gold or Diamond OA — the article simply loads without a paywall. But for research administrators, librarians, and funders tracking open-access compliance, the distinction is operationally important for two reasons:
- It is not durable. Because there is no license and no journal-level OA commitment, Bronze access can and does disappear — a phenomenon sometimes discussed alongside ‘open access link rot.’ An article counted as ‘open’ in a bibliometric snapshot may be paywalled again later, which is why large-scale OA studies report Bronze as a distinct, unstable category rather than folding it into Gold.
- It does not satisfy licensing-based funder mandates. A funder or institutional policy that requires a specific reuse license (for example, CC BY) is not satisfied by Bronze access, even though the article is currently readable at no cost, because there is no license granting the reuse rights the mandate specifies.
Origin of the term
The ‘Bronze’ category was introduced by Piwowar et al. in their 2018 study ‘The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles’ (PeerJ), which used the Unpaywall dataset to classify open-access articles into Gold, Green, Hybrid, and Bronze categories. The study found Bronze to be a substantial and previously under-discussed share of the free-to-read literature, distinct precisely because it lacked the license or repository characteristics defining the other categories.
Related CASRAI resources
See also Open access, Gold open access, Green open access, Diamond open access, and the comparison Gold vs Green vs Diamond vs Hybrid Open Access.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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