Open Access: Introduction

Increased visibility - OA articles are viewed and cited more often than articles behind a paywall.

Equity - OA publications can be used by almost anyone, including those who do not have access to or cannot afford traditional, subscription-based content.

Collaboration - OA facilitates collaboration between researchers from diverse locations, backgrounds and disciplines.

Expedited visibility - OA licensing allows content to be made publicly available immediately upon publication.

Compliance - OA publishing of research output is often required by funding organizations.

Some Myths About Open Access  [Written by, or adapted from, Vanderbilt University Libraries (current as of Aug. 13, 2024). If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. VU Libraries ResearchGuides is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CC-BY]

Peter Suber, Senior Advisor on Open Access and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project is an authority on the topic.      

Some headings from his Open Access Overview :

• "Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions"
• "The legal basis of OA is the consent of the copyright holder (for newer literature) or the expiration of copyright (for older literature)."
• "OA literature is not free to produce or publish."
• "OA is compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance."

His book, Open Access (MIT Press. 2012) is open-access, updated frequently, and available to read online or download.   

Open access journals fall into one of several types according to publishing model, licensing, and whether Article Processing Charges (APCs) are imposed. Publishers charge authors APCs to support the production costs of open access journals.

Gold - publisher makes articles fully accessible on the journal platform under a creative commons license. An APC is paid by the author or funder.

Hybrid - a subscription journal with some articles made open access via payment of APC by the author. The publisher is being paid twice for the article: once with the library's journal subscription, and again with the author's APC.

Diamond or Platinum - journals are published open access with no APC, and fully funded by institutions, associations, philanthropic organizations, or advertisers.

Bronze - journals are freely available to read but, with no creative commons license, cannot be reused.

Green  - not necessarily a journal, it refers to the self-archiving of articles in repositories.