OA Facts and Definitions

University Libraries

October 2015

Open Access (OA) scholarly literature is:

  • Digital
  • Online
  • Free of charge to the reader
  • Free of most copyright and licensing restrictions
  • Can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs.

Primary OA models

  • “Green OA” (also referred to as self-archiving) means that the published article or the final manuscript is archived (deposited) by the author in an online repository (i.e. KSUs’ Digital commons, a central repository (such as PubMed Central), or on some other open access website)
  • Free for authors
  • Cost incurred by the host institution
  • “Gold OA” refers to work published in an OA journal. This means that an article is immediately provided in open access mode as published. In this model, the payment ofpublication cost is based on one-off payments by author. These costsoften referred to as Author Processing Charges, (APCs). These costs are often supported by the university to which the researcher is affiliated, or to the fundingagency supporting the research.
  • “Hybrid OA” is an open access journal and a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. Authors pay APCs for open access status for their article. In the library community this is referred to a “double dipping”because the publisher receives the subscription payment form the library and also receives APC from the author.
  • SCOAP3 Consortia -SCOAP3 is a partnership of thousands of libraries, funding agencies and research centers in more than 40 countries. Working with leading publishers, SCOAP3 has converted key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors. SCOAP3 is centrally paying publishers for the costs involved in providing Open Access, publishers in turn reduce subscription fees to all their customers, who can contribute to SCOAP3. Each country participates in a way commensurate to its scientific output in this field. In addition, existing Open Access journals are also centrally supported, removing any existing financial barrier for authors. Some 4’000 articles eligible for inclusion in SCOAP3 are published every year, comprising the majority of the high-quality peer-reviewed literature in the field of High-Energy Physics. All articles are freely accessible on the publishers’ websites as well as in the SCOAP3 Repository.

Directory of Open Access Journals

  • DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. Itcontains more than 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

Mandates for OA

  • As of May 2015, open-access mandates have been adopted by over 550 universities and research institutions, and over 140 research funders worldwide.[18] Examples of universities which have open-access mandates are Harvard University[19] and MIT[20] in the United States and University College London[21] and ETH Zürich[22] in the European Union.
  • United States “OA has been experiencing a tremendous growth, as evidenced by the increasing number of journals publishing wholly OA or offering it on an article-level basis, more institutions adopting OA policies, and a mandate from the White House’s Office for Science and Technology Policy requiring federal agencies—as is already mandated for the National Institutes of Health—to make federally funded research available for public consumption.”[i][ii] Fruin, C. and Rascoe F. 2014, Funding open access journal publishing Article processing charges College & Research Libraries News, vol. 75 no. 5 240-243
  • European Union July 2012 Commission'sRecommendation on access to and preservation of scientific informationstates that “Policies on open access to scientific research results should apply to all research that receives public funds. Such policies are expected to improve conditions for conducting research by reducing duplication of efforts and by minimizing the time spent searching for information and accessing it. This will speed up scientific progress and make it easier to cooperate across and beyond the EU. Such policies will also respond to calls within the scientific community for greater access to scientific information.”

Predatory Publishers

  • These are questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. See Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers Beall’s List: