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.)
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003)
Declaration of support for Open Access in the sciences and humanities, as an indispensable approach to knowledge distribution in the digital age.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003)
Statement of principles in support of Open Access with a particular emphasis on the biomedical research community.
Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)
Statement from the early development of Open Access, laying out key priorities and values for this approach to scholarly communication.
SPARC on Open Access
Concise background on the significance of OA from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a leading advocacy organization of more than 200 academic and research library members.
SPARC Open Access Fact Sheet
Nicely formatted, printable fact sheet on OA.
Information and resources about open science policy, how open science advances the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a toolkit with information about implementing open science.
These resources provide a good starting point for learning about a publisher you may be interested in or other areas to explore. This is a selected list of databases that identify different aspects of open access policy including resources about policies at research institutions, funder policies, copyright matters, and funding information.
ROARMAP
A searchable database documenting OA policies enacted by universities and other research institutions, as well as their funders, around the world.
SHERPA/Juliet
A searchable database documenting the requirements of different research funders regarding open access publication and open data practices for scholars who receive financial support to carry out their work.
SHERPA/RoMEO
A searchable database containing information on the copyright and OA policies of academic publishers, on a journal-by-journal basis. This resource can be helpful in determining whether negotiation with your publisher may or may not be necessary to share your research in an OA format.
Open Access Publication Funds, Simmons University OA Directory
An alphabetically-ordered directory for locating organizations that provide affiliated researchers with funding to cover the author-facing charges that OA publishing occasionally entails.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Launched in 2003 by Lund University in Sweden, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is dedicated to “[increasing] the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language.”
Directory of Open Access Books
“The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books (...) The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer-reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.”