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In Open Access Explained!, Nick Shockey (Right to Research Coalition) and Jonathan Eisen (Biologist at University of California, Davis) explain open access, with animations by Jorge Cham of PhD comics.
Open Access is the free, immediate online availability of research articles. Currently scholarly research articles are often only accessible through expensive journal subscriptions also called "paywalls". Open Access aims to remove this access barrier and for knowledge to be freely accessed and shared by all.
We engage and invest in research in order to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, encourage innovation, enrich education, and stimulate the economy - to improve the public good. Communication of the results of research is an essential component of the research process; research can only advance by sharing the results, and the value of an investment in research is only maximized through wide use of its results.
Yet, too often, because of cost barriers or use restrictions, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. The Internet gives us the opportunity to bring this crucial information to a worldwide audience at virtually no marginal cost, and allows us to use it in new, innovative ways. This has resulted in a call for new framework to allow research results to be more easily accessed and used - the call for Open Access.
Open Access Button considers the terms outlined by the Creative Common's Attribution-Only license (CC-BY) to be the standard terms for Open Access.
There are four primary mechanisms that can be used to enable Open Access:
Over the past decade, Open Access has become central to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, businesses, and the public - as well as librarians. The digital environment poses new challenges and provides new opportunities in the sharing, review, and publication of research results. Ensuring broad, unfettered access to the knowledge contained in primary research articles and the rights to use these articles fully will play a key role in seeing that the scholarly communication system evolves in a way that supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.
Increasingly, institutions that support research - from public and private research funders to higher education institutions - are implementing policies that require researchers to make articles that report on research generated from their funding openly accessible to and fully useable by the public.
Learn more about these policies in the SPARC Advocacy section, which explores the motivations behind these policies, the basic components that emerging policies contain, as well as the basic components of current policies that effectively promote Open Access.
There are lots of great resources out there to learn more about Open Access. In further reading you can find a wealth of links to get you started.
There are a number of common misunderstandings about Open Access. The following are some of the more common. Hopefully this guide will clear them up and make things easier.
No, the Open Access movement is focusing on open-access for peer-reviewed literature. The goal is to remove access barriers, not changing the quality of research.
A journal's economic or access policy does not determine its peer review policy. Open Access journals can use the same peer review procedures, quality, processes and systems are the same as traditional journals. If traditional journals convert to Open Access, the quality of peer review doesn't change. The key variables in journal quality are the quality of authors, the quality of editors, and the quality of referees, all of which are independent of the journal's price or medium.
There are "predatory" publishers, do not publish with them. You can find advice on how to spot predatory publishers elsewhere in our advocacy guide.
Open Access repositories do not provide their own peer review, but they can and do host articles peer-reviewed elsewhere. Policies requiring green Open Access actively call for Open Access to peer-reviewed manuscripts.
According to the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), when researchers publish in fee-based Open Access journals, the fees are paid by funders (59%) or by universities (24%). Only 12% of the time are they paid by authors out of pocket.
If scholars decide to make their work available by the self archiving route, they never pay a fee to do so.
This misunderstanding ignores the fact that publication fees at fee-based Open Access journals pay for the free, immediate online availability with full re-use rights, which is the whole point. Subscriptions don't buy that.
Article Processing Charges in those journals that charge them buy access for everyone with an internet connection, including those who aren't paying fees, while subscriptions pay only for private use and consumption.
This is not true, in addition to lay citizens who do not have access, educators who would like to incorporate the latest scientific discoveries into their curricula do not have access, scientists and humanities researchers at institutions who cannot afford journal subscriptions do not have access. For example, Erin McKiernan has written openly about her struggles to get access to the literature she needs to do her research.
Since the launch of the Open Access Button Beta, we have collected more than 9,000 instances of people being denied access to research. This is only a small sample of the true value but within this 9,000 there are stories of scholars all over the world denied access to research.
Whichever way you estimate average price charged per article in the subscription system you end up with figures way higher than average APCs for born digital pure Open Access publishers.
While transitional costs for a move to journal-mediated OA funded (largely) through APCs are likely to be higher it is also the case that this will liberate subscription costs more rapidly. While we can generate wider access with relatively little transitional costs through repository-mediated OA this won't help to bring down subscriptions costs.
Even if it was more expensive, providing Open Access to academic work would still be the right thing to do. But in fact it is cheaper, more efficient, and creates new opportunities along the chain of the research process.
All articles are not available in academic libraries. With ever increasing costs of academic research journal subscriptions, libraries are not longer able to afford a subscription to all journals. Harvard, the richest university library in the world, announced in 2008 that they could no longer afford to subscribe to all journals.
The situation regarding academic libraries is only for those privileged enough to be part of a rich institution like a library. For many, there is no option of a well funded university library to subscribe to lots of journals. So far we have seen people from all backgrounds from all areas of the globe denied access to research.
Choosing to publish through an open access channel does not mean the article is not copyrighted.
The same options exist when publishing through an open access channel as when an article is published through a traditional publishing: the author may in some cases be able to retain copyright, or may be required to grant the journal publisher copyright. But in either case, the article is still copyrighted, either by the author or the publisher.
There is no direct and clean relationship between open access journals and copyright policy. Many, but not all, open access journals have liberal policies that allow authors to retain copyright. Most traditional subscription-based journals have standard copyright transfer agreements that require authors to turn over copyright upon publication, but some such publishers will agree to negotiate this requirement, or have a standard agreement that is more liberal.
As an author and copyright holder, if you wish to clearly instruct readers about what you authorize them to do with your content, you can attach a Creative Commons license.
Simple Answer: Open Access is the free immediate online availability to peer reviewed academic research with full re-use rights.
Longer Answer: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Simple Answer: No.
Longer Answer: Thomson Scientific found that in every field of the sciences "there was at least one Open Access title that ranked at or near the top of its field" in citation impact. The number of high-quality Open Access journals has only grown since then. The quality of a scholarly journal whether Open Access or not Open Access, is a function of its authors, editors, and referees.
Simple Answer: An APC is an article processing charge.
Longer Answer: This is a charge is a fee which is sometimes charged to publish an article in an academic journal. This fee is usually paid by an author's institution or research funder rather than by the author themselves. As you will read later, the majority of Open Access journals do not charge article processing charges.
Simple Answer: No, over 6000 open access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals do not charge publishing fees.
Longer Answer: Charging Article processing charges (APCs) is the best known model for Open Access journals, but it is a commonly held misconception that gold open access always equals payment, at the time of writing 6,447 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals did not charge for publishing in their journal. Of those that do there are a lot of journals that provide discounts to for article processing charges or no questions asked waivers. Please contact individual journals for more details about waivers and discounts.
Simple Answer: It's unlikely.
Longer Answer: According to the comprehensive Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), when researchers publish in fee-based open access journals, the fees are paid by funders (59%) or by universities (24%). Only 12% of the time are they paid by authors out of pocket. This is a good reason to stop using the term "author fees" for publication fees, or the term "author pays" for the fee-based business model.
Scholars who make their work green open access rather than gold never pay a fee to do so. Even when they choose the gold route, only 33% of peer-reviewed open access journals charge author-It follows that only 4% of authors who publish in open access journals (12% of 33%) pay fees out of pocket. At the same time, about 50% of articles published in peer-reviewed open access journals are published in fee-based journals. If we count by article rather than by journal, then only 6% of authors who publish in open access journals (12% of 50%) pay fees out of pocket.
Simple Answer: No, depending on individual journal policies you can self-archive your research. Check Sherpa ROMEO for deets.
Longer Answer: Most conventional publishers give standing permission for author-initiated green open access. Many of the others will give permission on request. For authors unsure of a publisher's position, check out the Sherpa RoMEO database of publisher policies, read the publishing contract, or ask an editor. It's always worth asking, if only to register demand and show rising expectations.
Because this permission comes from publishers themselves, it makes green open access lawful even when authors have transferred all relevant rights to publishers. However, the permission needn't come from publishers. Authors may retain relevant rights, on their own, through author addenda (lawyer-drafted contract modifications), or through open access policies at their funding agency or employer. For example, since 2005 the Wellcome Trust has had a policy requiring Wellcome-funded researchers to retain the right to authorise open access, if the publisher doesn't already permit or provide open access. The US National Institutions of Health (NIH) has had a similar policy since 2008. A new bill in Germany would allow authors to provide green open access to articles arising from publicly-funded research, regardless of their publishing contracts.
On the university side, departments in more than 40 universities around the world have adopted policies, inspired by those developed at Harvard, in which faculty grant their institution non-exclusive rights to make their future articles open access. Rights-retention policies like these assure that faculty may make their work open access even when they publish in a non-open access journal, even when the non-open access journal does not give standing permission for green open access, and even when faculty members have not negotiated special access terms or permissions with their publishers.
Bottom line: when the best journal in your field is not open access, and you're good enough to be published there, then you can publish there and still make your peer-reviewed text open access through a repository.
You can deposit your research papers in the open access subject (disciplinary) repositories. Browse the list of open access disciplinary repositories in the Open Access Directory (OAD). Unless otherwise noted, they accept relevant deposits regardless of the author's institutional affiliation. Or search and browse the Directory of Open Access Repositories to find the disciplinary repositories (in the Any Repository Type box choose Disciplinary).
You can also deposit your research papers into the OpenDepot.org an assured gateway to make research open access. It provides two main services: a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints); and a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist. The first time a researcher visits the OpenDepot.org, the repository will automatically check with OpenDOAR, the registry for open access repositories, to find a more appropriate local repository. If none exists then the author will be invited to deposit their research in the OpenDepot.org. The OpenDepot.org is OAI-compliant allowing deposited e-prints to be 'harvested' by search services, and other repositories, giving them instant global visibility.
Open source software, like free software, is a kind of software whose source code is available for inspection or modification. Some open source software is available for a fee, but much of it is available at no cost. To read more about free and open source software see http://www.eifl.net/foss
Open access is a kind of access or availability. This kind of access could apply to any digital content, such as software, music, movies, or news. But we only calls for open access to a certain kind of scientific and scholarly literature. To read more about open access see http://www.eifl.net/openaccess
Simple Answer: It depends.
Longer Answer: There is no direct and clean relationship between open access journals and copyright policy. Many, but not all, open access journals have liberal policies that allow authors to retain copyright. Most traditional subscription-based journals have standard copyright transfer agreements that require authors to turn over copyright upon publication, but some such publishers will agree to negotiate this requirement, or have a standard agreement that is more liberal. The same options exist when publishing through an open access channel as when an article is published through a traditional publishingl: the author may in some cases be able to retain copyright, or may be required to grant the journal publisher copyright. But in either case, the article is still copyrighted, either by the author or the publisher. As an author and copyright holder, if you wish to clearly instruct readers about what you authorize them to do with your content, you can attach a Creative Commons license.
Simple Answer: Open access to research and scholarship is not free - there are costs involved in making research available. The economic models to support unrestricted access to research are still being developed; the common thread among the models is that open access research is available at no charge to all readers.
Longer Answer: One model that exists is for there to be a payment when the author submits an article. Usually this charge to publish an open access article is covered by research grant funds. In 2004, one study by Elsevier found that this "author side" payment model encompassed just 17% of open access journals. In an updated study in 2007, Bill Hooker did a survey of all known open access journals and found that only 18% charged fees. The open access publisher BioMed Central offers a table comparing such author side payments. Other economic models are also being experimented with. For example, some new open access publishers, such as the for-profit BioMed Central, require author payments, but these are waived for institutions who've purchased a membership, as the MIT Libraries have for MIT. In other cases, such as the not-for-profit PLoS (Public Library of Science), the MIT Libraries' institutional membership reduces the publication fee for MIT faculty and researchers. Other titles are subsidized, often by scholarly societies, institutions, or foundations. The 2004 Elsevier study found that government or university subsidies accounted for 55% of the total open access titles, the largest portion. The remaining open access titles (28%) that were not supported by 'author side' payments, or by government or universities, were found to be subsidized by paid subscriptions to their print equivalents. Some journals are entirely open access; every article is available without restriction. Other journals are 'hybrid' in that they are traditional subscription-based journals, but offer authors the choice to pay a fee to make their individual article freely accessible to anyone worldwide. The other articles in the journal remain accessible only through subscription. Some publishers offer all their titles under one kind of open access policy, and others have different policies for different titles. In 2006, the MIT Press launched its first entirely open access journal, Information Technologies and International Development.
There are a number of strategies to reach Open Access to research. Open Access delivered by journals is called "gold" Open Access and Open Access delivered by repositories is called "green" Open Access. There is a myth that all Open Access is gold , even for peer-reviewed articles but that is not true. Today most Open Access in medicine and biomedicine is gold, but in every other field it's mostly green.
In university and funding agency mandated Open Access, nearly every Open Access policy is a green policy, requiring deposit in an Open Access repository rather than submission to Open Access journals. This guide provides some recommendations for those of you that publish research and who want to publish open access.
If you want to publish your work in an Open Access journal, it can be difficult deciding which one and there are a lot of variables that may impact your decision. Things you can do to help are:
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the foremost listing of all Open Access journals out there. At the time of writing, it includes over 10,000 Open Access journals from all fields of publishing. If you regard open access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, then there are 2159 journals that publish research under a CC-BY licence, the licence most in keeping with the Budapest definition. It is a commonly held misconception that gold open access always equals payment; at the time of writing 6,447 journals did not charge for publishing in their journal. Of those that do there are a lot of journals that provide discounts to for article processing charges or no-questions-asked waivers. Please contact individual journals for more details about waivers and discounts.
Journals that support themselves financially by charging APCs to support the costs associated with publication are aware that some researchers do not have a means by which to pay. Therefore they have established systems and eligibility criteria for those researchers in need, to apply for fee waivers.
Fees can either be waived in their entirety, or a partial discount off the standard APC may be offered, depending on your eligibility criteria. If you can't find their waiver/discount policy email the journal/publisher to ask about it.
Example fee waiver policies include (a non-exhaustive list):
You may have heard about predatory Open Access publishers and it's true; they do exist, but there are a number of things you can do to prevent publishing your work in a predatory journal.
To help identify predatory journals, they typically:
To protect yourself against predatory publishers you can:
Running basic checks like this before you think of submitting your work to a journal can really help. The final point about reading the journal is important, a particular journal to publish in may be ok but if researchers in your area don't read this journal or haven't heard of this journal you probably shouldn't submit your work there unless you're sure you want to support the journal with your work.
If the journal allows it, you may be able to upload a pre-print (a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal) of your paper before submitting it to a journal.
Suggested preprint servers include:
In addition to this, give permission for authors to self archive their work (green open access). Some publishers will also give permission on request. If you publish in a non-open access journal, a really useful resource is the Sherpa/RoMEO database of publisher policies.
If you are wanting to self archive your work, the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) lists more than 3,700 repositories, both subject-based open access repositories and institutional open access repositories.
Librarians are awesome. Talk to them! They are a fountain of wisdom and may have funds to support APC-driven open access publishing.
Some Open Access journals will reduce the article processing charges to society members, emailing to ask can save a lot in article processing charges.
If you can put Open Access publication funding in your grant proposals - research funders recognise that publishing costs money - many are willing to fund this. If your grant does not allow it, reach out to your program manager and ask whether they plan to alter the policy.
Many traditional journals will ask you to give them your copyright of your work (this isn't actually necessary for them to publish it, but many still insist), with a Copyright Transfer Agreement. Consider using the SPARC Author Addendum to take back your rights. (N.B This may not always work).
Avoid needlessly expensive APC-charging journal option, many of the legacy journal publishers offer expensive 'hybrid' Open Access publication options in their traditional journals. Check the price of these options with your research librarian before you choose these options. Some can charge US$3000 - US$5000!
If the journal allows it, you may be able to upload a pre-print (a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal) of your paper before submitting it to a journal.
Suggested preprint servers include:
While many publisher contracts have you sign over all the rights, this is certainly not needed for them to publish your research. By only signing over the rights that you need to, you will be able to more easily make your research available openly. You can try this using the following few steps:
N.B. This route is far from guaranteed to be successful. In some cases publishers will outright reject any attempt to modify their standard agreement terms and conditions. So be prepared to play 'hardball' and withdraw your publication if they don't agree to the addendum. Even if they do eventually agree to the addendum, the whole process can inadvertently slow-up the publication process and these delays may frustrate your co-authors.
In addition to this, allow authors to self archive their work in insitutional repositories, a route that is commonly known as "green open access". If you publish in a non-open access journal, a really useful resource to check the self-archiving policies of traditional journals is the Sherpa/RoMEO database of publisher policies. From there ask your librarian for help or send us an email at [email protected].
If you are wanting to self archive your work, the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) lists more than 3,700 repositories, both subject-based open access repositories and institutional open access repositories.
If you're a student, reach out to your professors and librarians. Let them know you care about Open Access. Send an email, grab them after class, or set up a meeting. Talk to them. Especially ask if they can publish their work Open Access or self archive existing work. Encourage your librarians to include Open Access in the mandatory library orientation for incoming students. Use our guides to bust those myths and answer questions.
Read our guides to get up to speed on everything from the challenges we face in getting access to the results of research to the impact of limited access. You'll learn what you need to know about Open Access and Open Access advocacy so we can make progress on this issue together.
After you've learned what we're fighting for (and why we want to change things), get connected by subscribing to our blog or Twitter feed, or by liking us on Facebook. That way you'll know all the latest Open Access news and get our Action Alerts when there are exciting new opportunities for you to make a difference.
Taking your voice to a public forum can be an extremely effective form of advocacy and you can publish anything you want with just a few clicks on a blog. If you don't have a blog, school/local newspapers are around for just this purpose and they're often itching for content. Open Access affects everybody, and an opinion piece or letter to the editor calling for change - in a few hundred words - is sure to garner interested comments or emails. If you're writing for a blog or for a newspaper, let us know and we can help.
Lots and lots of organizations have an interest in opening up access to academic research. You could bring up anything from the access barriers at your institution to the heavy toll lack of access to research has on students, researchers, patients, and doctors all over the world, or something else. Let them know that access is an issue and urge them to join advocacy efforts.
If you're a student, researcher or professor, spend some time working to bring them on board.
