Open Access: Open Access Publishing Models

Open access journals typically have the following characteristics:

• They are scholarly/ peer reviewed
• Utilize quality control mechanisms just like conventional journals
• Freely and openly available on the web
• No charge to readers

Authors can publish their work in a traditional open access journal, a hybrid open access journal, or a delayed open access journal.

Traditional Open Access Journals

• Journals established by digital commercial or nonprofit publishers for the sole purpose of publishing open access content
• Typically  utilize a Creative Commons Attribution License for publishing
• Authors usually retain their copyright.
• Different funding strategies used to support the journal:
• Advertising
• Membership fees
• Author fees (money may come from the author or more likely the author's research grant)
• Can be waived in cases of financial hardship
• Subsidies from institutions such as universities, laboratories, research centers, libraries, foundations, museums or government agencies

Ex:  Journals published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Hybrid Open Access Journals

• Journals where only some of the articles are open access
• Open access status requires the payment of a publication fee/ processing fee to the publisher
• Definition of open access may vary according to publisher

Ex: Publishers offering hybrid open access include:  Elsevier:  Open Access Options; Oxford University Press:  Oxford Open; SAGE Publications:  SAGE Open; for a more extensive list of publishers visit SHERPA/RoMEO's page Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access

Delayed Open Access Journals

• Traditional subscription-based journal
• Provide open access or free access after the elapse of an embargo period following the initial date of publication
• Embargo periods vary from a few months to two or more years
• Journal subscription or individual article purchase required to view articles prior to the end of the embargo period
• Model adopted by many scholarly society journals

Ex. Journal Molecular Biology of the Cell (2 month embargo)

Authors self-archive pre-print¹ or post-print² copies of their articles or conference papers in:

• Instutional repositories, e.g. Institutional Repository
• Subject or discipline-specific repositories, e.g.
  • Legal Scholarship Network (SSRN)
  • arXiv.org (Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics)
  • RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)
• Author's Personal Websites

For tenure review purposes self-archiving is not considered a valid form of peer-review publication.

Although self-archiving copies of your work won't help you with tenure, there are still benefits:

• Increased visibilty, exposure, usage and imapct of your research
• Expanded readership of your work beyond subscribers to the journal in which the research is published

1. pre-print = the version of the article before the peer review process

2. post-print = the version of the article after the peer review process, with edits but lacking final formatting used in the journal