What is Open Access Publishing?
WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
Publishing open access means making peer reviewed scholarly manuscripts freely available via the Internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
THE FOUR DIFFERENT FORMS OF OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING
Gold Open Access
- Usually refers to a journal’s online policy, which may allow immediate open access to the final edited version of a peer reviewed journal publication
- Peer Review: the article goes through the journals’ processes of peer review
- Public Access: the public has immediate access to the final, published version of the article; or, after several years, the journal may make articles open access
- Funding Models: the researcher pays a fee to the journal, which can be between hundreds and thousands of dollars (e.g. Nature); or, an institution pays an annual membership which waives its members’ publishing fees (e.g. PLoS)
Green Open Access
- Usually refers to a journal’s policy which allows scholars to upload a version of their article to a digital repository: these may be preprints (the version originally submitted) or postprints (final manuscript versions that underwent peer review). Usually, these versions have not been typeset by the publisher.
- Peer Review: a scholar can post a paper that may or may not have gone through peer review; a journal with a green open access policy will often allow an author to post the pre-print, edited, and peer reviewed version of an article
- Public Access: articles are immediately available to the public
- Funding Models: neither the researcher nor the public pays a fee; repositories are supported through institutional funding.
Diamond Open Access
- This is a relatively recent model similar to Gold Open Access, but with the important innovation that there is no fee for authors.
- Peer Review: the article goes through the journals’ processes of peer review
- Public Access: the public has immediate access to the final, published version of the article
- Funding Models: the researcher pays no fee to the journal (e.g. Episciences Project)
Researchers can consult SHERPA/RoMEO to learn which type of OA is supported by the journals they seek to publish their work in.
HYBRID OPEN-ACCESS JOURNALS
A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. It is generally discouraged as journals "double-dip" (by receiving the usual subscription fee in addition to the one-time OA fees).
GERMAN SECONDARY PUBLISHING RIGHT
In addition to the above, researchers at German universities have a secondary publishing right to their work (§ 38 Abs. 4 UrhG). All research...
- that is at least 50% publicly funded (including third-party funds)
- published in periodicals or collections published at least twice a year
...can be published in an openly available repository (OSF, the university website) in the accepted version of the manuscript after an embargo period of 1 year.