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Open Access Publishing

The Open Access  (OA) model supports the open dissemination of research and knowledge creation and refers to resources that are in digital format and available online and free of charge to the reader.

  • These resources are not necessarily free to publish and authors or their sponsors may be required to pay article processing fees (APCs).
  • OA has many permutations and authors considering publishing in this forum should be aware of different levels and versions of OA

OA Quality, Access, and Discoverability

OA literature  should undergo the usual scholarly publication processes, including peer review, copyright protection, and discoverability through indexing and other scholarly and research forums.

  •  Copyright restrictions for OA literature are the same as those that protect conventional scholarly literature:
    • Access is based on the consent of the copyright owner, or, includes literature available in the public domain, where copyright has expired. 
  • Free academic search engines like Semantic Scholar, index OA scholarly resources
  • Subscription-based citation databases, SCOPUS and Web of Science, select and index peer-reviewed OA resources
 

Publishing Models for Scholarly OA Works

Two main models include:

Gold OA: scholarly works are published in an open access journal and available directly to the public for free through the publisher’s platform.

Green OA: publishers allow authors to self-archive a published or pre-publication version of their work, usually in a OA repository (organization or subject), for access to the public for free. Publishers may allow authors to archive immediately or after an agreed period. The journal will publish the final version using a traditional or an open access model.

 

Dissemination of Scholarly OA works:

Open Access journals - all articles are available for free to the public. Submitting authors may need to pay article processing charges.

Hybrid journals include both OA and subscription-based access to scholarly literature. Hybrid journals may charge article processing fees for publishing open access scholarly works and may allow authors to self-archive a version of a published paper.

OA repositories include institutional repositories, discipline, or format specific digital repositories. OA repositories do not support peer review processes, but may host articles already peer reviewed or may include some level of moderation for preprints. An author should own copyright or has received permission from the publisher to archive (for example, Green OA).