Source: Megan Graewingholt, CSUF Library. Licensed under a CC-BY License
Source: MikeAMorrison, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Open access (OA) is a publishing movement aimed at making research freely available online.
When research is fully open access, it is free for the public to access, read, download, copy, share, or use for any other lawful purpose. This approach to open access was established in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) and Berlin Declaration (2003).
Most publishers own the rights to the articles in their journals. Anyone who wants to read the articles must pay to access them. Anyone who wants to use the articles in any way must obtain permission from the publisher and is often required to pay an additional fee.
Although many researchers can access the journals they need via their institution and think that access is free, in reality it is not. The institution has often been involved in lengthy negotiations around the price of their site license and reuse of this content is limited.
Open Access journals today vary widely across a spectrum based on the core components of reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights and more. The highest possible level of Open Access means that articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere, to be downloaded, printed, distributed, read, reused and remixed (including commercially) without restriction, as long as the author and the original source are properly attributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
--Adapted from PLOS Open Access
In general, we say that any research that is free to read online is open access. There are different models of open access, including Gold OA and Green OA:
Gold OA is when research is available as open access immediately from the publisher. Authors usually retain copyright, and the publisher may license the work under a Creative Commons license.
Gold OA articles can appear in open access journals, where all content is immediately open, or in 'hybrid' journals, where they appear alongside closed articles.
This model often requires the researcher, institution, or funding body pay an article processing charge (APC) to the publisher in exchange for making it open access.
Green OA, also called the 'author self-archiving' model, involves making an approved version of a publication openly accessible in a repository, such as SHAREOK.
Most journals allow the author's accepted manuscript (or pre-print) of an article to be made OA in a repository, often after an embargo period. Book publishers tend to have more restrictive policies and often do not allow Green OA deposit.
Academic Journals is a publisher of more than 100 peer-reviewed open access journals covering art and humanities, engineering, medical science, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences, and agricultural sciences, according to the organization's website. Today, all articles published by the organization are available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden. It began with 300 open access journals, according to its website, and now contains about "12,000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science, and humanities." All of the articles in DOAJ's database are available under a CC license, typically a CC-BY 3.0 or CC-BY 4.0 license.
DOAB is a discovery service for peer reviewed open access books and book publishers that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books.
Frontiers launched in 2007 and today includes 79 journals covering 662 academic disciplines, with nearly 140,000 articles published to date, all open access with a Creative Commons 4.0 International license. Subjects covered include science, health, engineering, humanities and social sciences, sustainability, and young minds.
Hindawi is one of the largest publishers of peer-reviewed, openly licensed journals. The company publishes more than 20,000 articles a year in its 250+ academic journals, covering science, technology, medicine, and social science. Hindawi publishes its journals under what is known as the Gold Open Access model: all of its articles are free to users and can be retained, reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed as long as proper attribution is provided. All Hindawi journals are published under either a CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY 3.0 license.
PLOS Journals includes a suite of open access, openly licensed multidisciplinary journals covering biology, medicine, computational biology, genetics, tropical diseases, and pathogens. The collection also includes the journal PLOS ONE, the world's largest multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal. All PLOS journals are available under a CC-BY 4.0 license
Scientific Research Publishing produces more than 200 open access, peer-reviewed journals covering a broad scope of academic disciplines, including biomedical and life sciences; chemistry and materials science; earth and environmental sciences; medicine and healthcare; social sciences and humanities; business and economics; computer science and communications; engineering; and physics and mathematics. All of the publisher's journals are available under either a CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.
SpringerOpen, launched in 2010, today includes more than 200 peer-reviewed open journals across many areas of science. Articles in SpringerOpen’s journals are published under a CC BY 2.0 license and are accessed both on the Open Journal website and via the leading open access repositories. The journals cover 25 different subject areas, from Architecture/Design to Social Sciences.
PubMed is a research database operated by the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, that contains more than "29 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books," according to its website. Some of the citations provide links to full-text articles, which take the user to an external website, usually the publisher's, where the full-text can be retrieved. Not all of these full-text articles are available under a CC license.
Predatory Open Access Journals "exist for the sole purpose of profit, not the dissemination of high-quality research findings and furtherance of knowledge. These predators generate profits by charging author fees, also known as article processing charges (APCs), that far exceed the cost of running their low-quality, fly-by-night operations.
Charging a fee is not itself a marker of a predatory publisher: many reputable OA journals use APCs to cover costs, especially in fields where research is often funded by grants. (Many subscription-based journals also charge authors fees, sometimes per page or illustration.) However, predatory journals are primarily fee-collecting operations—they exist for that purpose and only incidentally publish articles, generally without rigorous peer review, despite claims to the contrary."
--College & Research Libraries News
DOAJ is considered a Open Access Journal whitelist, listing journals it has vetted and found to be of good quality, while Beall's List lists OA journals it deems "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers."
