What is Open Access?
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free-of-charge and free of most copyright and licencing restrictions (Peter Suber). In effect users can view OA material online without having to pay a fee to do so.
The traditional academic journal publishing model is one where publishers organise peer-review, print and circulate research articles and in return the academic author signs over copyright of the article to the publisher, and the reader of the article must pay a fee to view it in compliance with strict conditions on re-use of the article’s contents. This model is now changing due to a number of factors:
- authors want to retain the copyright in their articles in order to disseminate their research outputs as widely and quickly as possible
- OA to recently published research articles increases their impact and citation count
- research funder requirements for research outputs of publicly funded research to be made available without restriction at the time of publication or within a very short timeframe thereafter, usually 6 months from the date of online publication.
For example the 7 RCUK funding councils now require research outputs resulting from research they have funded to be made available on an OA basis within 6 months of publication with some exceptions. Other research funders such as the European Commission, The Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK have similar polices on OA to research outputs.
Routes to Open Access Publishing
There are two recognised routes to publishing research articles so they are freely available online on an OA basis.
Self-Archiving in Open Access Repositories – Green Open Access
The academic author has a research article published in the traditional manner, an appropriate version of the article, which also complies with the publisher agreement, is also made available in an online OA repository in addition to the publisher’s website. Examples of these repositories are institutional repositories like the Queen’s Research Portal or a subject based portal such as the physics portal arXiv or the life sciences portal European PubMed Central. Self-archiving of research publications is free, the OA repositories provide access to bibliographic details (metadata) and, in many cases, the full text of research outputs produced by academics. Currently 68% (RoMEO Statistics) of publishers formally allow some form of self-archiving.
The version of the journal article to be made available in the OA repository must comply with all publisher copyright regulations. It is usually the author final version post peer review that is made available. In most cases publishers do not allow the inclusion of the final publisher pdf of the journal article. The Sherpa RoMEO database details publisher policies on OA archiving.
Open Access Journals and Hybrid Journals – Gold Open Access
With this economic model of OA journals, a charge for publication services is levied through the payment of article processing charges (APCs) by the author of the article before publication, not after publication through the payment of subscriptions by the reader. An academic author who wants to publish in an OA journal must pay an APC once an article has been accepted for publication. OA journals only offer this open access model (paying APCs) to fund the publication process, examples include BioMed Central and PLoS journals. A list of OA journals is provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals.
The major publishers of traditional subscription based journals such as Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell and Oxford University Press are now offering two OA APC payment models. Firstly, OA journals such as Elsevier Open Access journals and Wiley Open Access journals which operate in the same way as other OA journals, i.e. journal publishing costs are all met by the payment of article processing charges (APCs). Secondly, these publishers are offering a paid OA option for most of the traditional subscription based journals that they publish. In this case a subscription to the journal title is still available, but the publisher also offers the author the facility to pay an APC when an article is accepted for publication so that it can be made OA immediately on publication. These journals are known as hybrid journals.
OA articles are available to view on publisher websites, the licences attached to these articles give the reader more freedom to re-use the article content than that which prevails with journal articles published in traditional subscription based journals. Each publisher has their own OA licence which should be read by authors at Queen’s and the readers of the articles.
Articles submitted to OA journals and to hybrid journals where an APC is selected are peer-reviewed in the same way as articles submitted to traditional subscription based journals, that is they are accepted for publication on their own merit. The APC is only paid when the article is accepted for publication.
