Open access publishing provides an opportunity for researchers to make their work and science as a whole more accessible and equitable. Below are some reccommended resources for those interested in finding and submitting to open access publications, as well as a brief overview of the open access model of publication.
You may want to publish your work open access -- or you may be required to publish your work open access if your research is subject to a legal or contractual requirement from your funder (a “funder mandate"). Learn more about these in our Open Research and Scholarship guide.
There are several models for making scholarship available openly or providing public access. Some of the more common models are defined below.
Keep in mind that the contracts that govern grants or other funding may require a particular kind of public access. These may be defined in the terms and conditions in the agreement that governs your grant -- or by law. Most federal agencies that fund research require public access to resulting publications and datasets. It's important to understand which open access publishing model complies with your funder's public access policy and/or meets your goals for disseminating your scholarship.
The University of North Texas open access Glossary provides helpful, plain-language definitions for specialized words and expressions often associated with open access like Green open access, Gold open access, Article Processing Charge (APC), repository, pre-print, post-print, and more. Here are some essential definitions:
...means that the scholarship is freely available at no charge to the author.
...means that payment of an article processing charge (APC) may be required to make an article freely available, open access.
...means that a journal publisher uses both open access and subscription models to make its content available. Hybrid models may require APCs as a condition of open access. High-profile journals and publishers in many disciplines are developing hybrid options for authors who choose -- or are required by funding mandates -- to make their work open.
...means that some version of an article or work of scholarship is made available open access someplace other than the formal version of record (for example, a preprint shared through an institutional, subject, or disciplinary repository with the formal publication in a journal) or on a different timeline (for example, with an embargo period under which the article is kept closed for a time before it may be shared openly). The UNT Glossary explains that “Many publishers' author contracts give the author the right to post a preprint, post-print, or the final version in such a fashion; other author contracts can be amended to allow for this right by special arrangement or by using a standard author addendum.” (Thousands of peer-reviewed materials are available in Deep Blue Documents, U-M’s institutional repository for documents.)