Open Access

Fundamentally, Open Access means making your work available to other researchers and the general public, for reading, learning, and engagement, without significant technological, financial, or legal barriers.

 

Open access is not the same as making your work available copyright-free or placing it into the public domain. You still retain the fundamental rights of authorship to your work under Open Access. Open Access simply allows you to exercise more control over the future of your work by increasing its visibility to those who could use and benefit most from it.

 

There are two main ways to publish open access: Gold open access and green open access.

 

Gold open access means publishing with a journal or monograph publisher that makes all their works available open by default. 

 

While the majority of these publishers provide gold Open Access publishing without cost to you as author or to readers, some gold Open Access publishing can involve “article” or “author processing charges,” also known as APCs. These charges vary and can, in some instances, be discounted, waived, or covered by a research funder. Nevertheless, it is important to note that most gold Open Access is absolutely free. 

 

There are many great resources for finding well-known, reputable gold Open Access publishers, including the Directory of Open Access Journals, the DOAJ, and the Directory of Open Access Books, the DOAB.

 

The second type, green open access, means publishing with any type of journal or monograph publisher, but retaining sufficient rights to your work to self-deposit a copy of your manuscript into a repository. 

 

Green Open Access typically involves deposit of a version of your manuscript. The version of your manuscript that you are permitted to deposit will vary by publisher. Usually, your publisher will permit you to deposit a pre-print or a post-print. 

 

Your pre-print is the submitted version of your manuscript before peer review, and your post-print is the version that includes all changes from peer review but has not yet been formatted for final publication.

 

The database SHERPA/RoMEO is a great resource for determining which publishers permit green Open Access and which versions of your work they allow for deposit.

 

As with all Open Access, the key to green Open Access is retaining sufficient rights and control to your work, and that means negotiating your publishing contracts to ensure that you do not sign all the hard-earned rights to your work away to your publisher.