Clinicians and patients in many parts of the world do not have access to subscription journals. This can have a profound effect on the delivery of health care and the decisions patients make about their health care options. Arthur Amman, President of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention, made a remark: “I recently met a physician from southern Africa, engaged in perinatal HIV prevention, whose primary access to information was abstracts posted on the internet. Based on a single abstract, they had altered their perinatal HIV prevention program from an effective therapy to one with lesser efficacy. Had they read the full text article they would have undoubtedly realized that the study results were based on short-term follow-up, a small pivotal group, incomplete data, and unlikely to be applicable to their country situation. Their decision to alter treatment based solely on the abstract’s conclusions may have resulted in increased perinatal HIV transmission”
Definition
Open access (OA) publishing refers to the process of making research outputs freely available online without any barriers to access. It includes sharing outputs in a way that removes, or greatly reduces, barriers to reuse, such as through open copyright licensing.
Open access publishing is not restricted to academic articles in peer-reviewed journals and can include the open sharing of other research outputs such as book chapters, and thesis projects.
Open access publication charges
Many open access journals charge authors an article processing charge at the time their work is accepted. This fee supports the journal/publisher but removes barriers in access to readers (i.e., readers access the work for free). Not all open access journals charge author fees, see examples of journals that don’t have fees here.
Most open access journals offer waivers for article processing charges to authors from low income nations, or to students who may not have funding to pay these fees. In emerging public health situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, many journals and publisher choose to waive article processing charges and make all published COVID-19 related papers open access.
Open access and licenses
In open access publishing researchers typically retain the copyright to their work and simply license the journal/publisher to share their work. Licensing is often achieved via creative commons licenses and allows researchers to maintain greater control of their work. Use of a CC-BY licence is common; this requires only acknowledgement to re-use the materials. Other creative commons licenses are described in this table by Creative Commons Australia.
Subscription-based journals do not make their content openly available. In this model of publishing, content is published behind a paywall and those wishing to access it are required to pay a fee. Content is also typically published with more restrictive copyright licenses, which can create barriers to reuse content. Researchers typically sign over the copyright to the work to the journal/publisher for them to subsequently monetize access and reuse. Often institutions, such as university libraries, purchase subscription journal licenses in bundles from publishers. In this model author’s publishing their research are not required to pay any related article processing charges. Subscription-based publishing was the dominant publication model prior to the early 2000s when open access publishing became more mainstream. PLOS, a mega open access publisher, was conceived in 2000 and increased the visibility of open access publishing when they released their first exclusively open access journal in 2003. Now hybrid journals that use aspects of both the open access publishing and subscription-based publishing model exist; in the next section the common types of open access journals are described.
There are a number of different types of open access journals, the main formats are described below:
Platinum OA Journal: Sometimes referred to a ‘Diamond Open Access’, this refers to journals that publish research open access, making content immediately free, without charging and article processing fee. These journals are typically supported financially by an external source, such as an academic society. A list of examples of platinum journals is maintained here.
Gold OA Journal: This refers to journals that publish research open access, making content immediately free to access, but that charge an article processing fee from authors. Examples of Gold OA journals are all of those published by PLOS or BioMed Central (BMC).
Hybrid OA: This refers to a journal that has a mixture of content some of which is open access and some of which is behind a paywall and requires a subscription to access. Some journals make particular content (e.g, commentaries) openly available while keeping other content (e.g., research articles) behind a paywall. Many subscription-based journals also allow for authors to pay an article processing charge to make their specific article open access. Further, some journals operate with a delayed OA model in which all content is eventually made OA after an embargo period. These journals therefore contain a hybrid of open and closed articles.
Green OA: This refers to a journal that permits an author to share a self-archived version of their final article openly and independently from the publication of the article in the journal. Many subscription-based journals allow for self-archiving but may impose an embargo period.
If you are publishing in a subscription-based journal you are likely still able to create an open access archived version of your accepted article. Many journals allow for this, but may have specific restrictions. Consider the following steps:
1. Check your journal/publisher self-archiving policy using SHERPA/RoMEO
You can confirm your journal/publishers self-archiving policy on their website. Note that many journals have an embargo period, meaning that you can deposit your work immediately in a repository but must ensure it is not publicly available until after the embargo.
2. Self-archive a copy of your work
There are many options for self-archiving your paper. These include institutional repositories (e.g., RUOR) or platforms such as medRxiv or OSF.
There are numerous benefits of OA publishing including:
Reducing inequity: Conducting research is expensive, and much of the research that is conducted is funded by tax dollars. When research is published open access it is free for all to read and reuse; this allows for the broadest uptake and biggest return on funding investment.
For example, when health research is published openly it means that patients and clinicians can access the materials. This may enable patients to be more active participants in their own health care decisions, or those of their family members, since they are empowered by the full information available relate to their health issue. Further, open access also allows all clinicians to access the work, meaning that it reduces inequity in access to information in jurisdictions where fees to pay subscription licenses are not available.
Citation advantage: Research suggests that work that is published open access goes on to be cited more than work that is behind a paywall. A study by Heather Piwowar and colleagues found that OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, which was an effect driven primarily by Green open access and Hybrid open access journals.
Authors retain their copyright: Unlike the traditional subscription-based publishing model, OA publishing typically involves publishing free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, and allows authors, rather than journals, to retain copyright of their work.
Researchers ought to consider their open access dissemination plan for their research project at the front end of their research project. This would include considerations such as:
1. Can I request support in my grant application for open access article processing charges related to the dissemination of the work?
2. Do I need to comply with any mandates from my funder or institution related to open access publishing?
3. Is the journal I want to target open access?
If not:
Can the work be self-archived via a Green OA approach?
What is an appropriate repository to make the work Green OA?
4. What type of creative commons license do I want to use to share my work?