There are thousands of OA journals, but some journals and publishers are more open than others; some are hybrid offering select articles as OA, while others are less open again. This spectrum of publishing options is charted in 'HowOpenIsIt'.
Signing a copyright transfer agreement with a publisher does not necessarily stop an author from making their work open access as there are two different approaches to Open Access Publishing, known as "Gold" and "Green" publishing. The Open Access Publishing page in this guide has more information on these.
This guide was developed by the University of Canberra Library staff.
In preparing this guide information was gathered from numerous Open Access guides available in this area. Our thanks go to our colleagues in the Open Access community, especially the University of Western Australia.
Under LibGuide agreements the material in this guide can be shared by the LibGuide community. The material may also be re-used for non-commercial purposes beyond LibGuides however we ask for acknowledgement and notification from the user.
Open Access refers to unrestricted online access to articles published in scholarly publications. Types of open access publications available online include articles, books and book chapters, conference papers, theses, working papers, data and images.
There are three different ways of obtaining open accessibility to scientific research results:
Self-archive an open access version - Authors publish in the journal of their choice and archive or link to a freely available version of the manuscript in their institution's repository (UC Research Repository), or in a national repository (e.g. PubMed Central). A large percentage of publishers permit authors to archive a version of their article in an institutional repository.
Publish in an open access journal - Authors publish in Open Access journals that provide free and immediate access to the articles via the publishers web site. Authors may be required to pay an article processing charge.
Pay to publish open access in a traditional journal - a large percentage of subscription journals offer an Open Access publishing option, where articles can be made immediately available via open access. Authors are required to pay an article processing charge.
Introductory writings about open access by advocate Peter Suber