Open Access

What is Open Access?

Open Access(OA) enables scholarly research to be made freely available online with limited restrictions on its reuse.

The impetus for Open Access has been the belief that the results of research are a public good and they should be made available to all, regardless of ability to pay for access. For the most part this will involve making available post-print copies of refereed journal articles conference proceedings.

There are two main routes for authors wishing to publish an Open Access article:

Gold Open Access - a fee is paid to the Publisher to make the final published version freely available, usually via their website.

• Articles can be published in a fully Open Access journal or as an Open Access article in a traditional subscription journal such as Elsevier (called Hybrid Open Access publishing).
• Publishers often charge a processing fee (Article Processing Charge or APC) on accepted articles to cover expenses incurred through peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space.

Green Open Access - authors deposit an article to be made freely available in the Institutional Repository (IR) or via a discipline specific repository.

• This may be an un-refereed preprint, but, typically, the author will publish in a journal via the traditional route and then self-archive the post-prints.
• There is usually no charge for depositing an article into an Institutional Repository (IR), but if you are depositing an article that was published in a non-Open Access journal originally, then the publisher may insist on certain conditions, such as an embargo period.
• The article is made freely available without the payment of an APC