Publishing in Open
Access Journals
Open Access (OA) is defined as “free, immediate, online
availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles
fully in the digital environment”, https://sparcopen.org/open-access/
Publishers are producing Open Access
journals allowing information to be read at no cost to the reader. There are three different open access
publishing models.
Fully OA journals
(gold open access)—these are journals which the author may or may not
require a payment, an “article processing charge” APC.
Hybrid journals—these
are subscription based journals which the author pays an article fee to allow
the article freely available permanently for everyone to read after
publication.
Green Open Access—author
publishes an article in any journal subscription, then self-archives a copy on
their own web site or institutional repository.
Authors must review the journals’ requirements for green open
access. Specifications can include an
embargo period, use of author’s final peer-reviewed version, publisher’s
version, or accepted manuscript. SHERPA/RoMEO, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?colour=green,
is a source where authors can review publisher copyright policies and
self-archiving rights.
A brief video from the University of Minnesota Libraries
explaining gold and green open access, including a review of the advantages and
disadvantages of each.
Publishers have embraced open access by providing supportive
guidelines (not an exhaustive list):
Elsevier Publishing: https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access
Wiley Publishing: https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-science/open-access/index.html
Springer Publishing: https://www.springer.com/us/open-access
Nature Publishing: https://www.nature.com/openresearch/publishing-with-npg/
Looking for a possible open access journal—try DOAJ.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a service
that indexes high quality, peer reviewed Open Access research journals,
periodicals and their articles' metadata. The Directory aims to be
comprehensive and cover all open access academic journals that use an
appropriate quality control system and is not limited to particular languages,
geographical region, or subject areas. The Directory aims to increase the
visibility and ease of use of open access academic journals—regardless of size
and country of origin—thereby promoting their visibility, usage and impact. https://doaj.org/faq#whatis
This blog post has been written by committee members from
the Georgia Knowledge Repository (GKR) http://www.gaknowledge.org/ The GKR is a
central metadata repository containing records from participating GALILEO
institutions that can be freely searched by the citizens of Georgia and the
scholarly community at large.