Open Access Week 2017
This week is International Open Access Week, which takes place annually in the last full week of October. The underlying principles of open access (OA) scholarship are to make scholarly research available in digital forms online, free of charge and free of many copyright and licensing restrictions. This year’s Open Access Week theme is “Open in order to…” This open-ended (pun intended) slogan is designed to prompt researchers to consider all the ways in which they and their potential readers can benefit from scholarship that can be freely accessed and used. In a blog post, Nick Shockey of SPARC* gives several examples: “Open in order to increase the impact of my scholarship. Open in order to enable more equitable participation in research. Open in order to improve public health.”
Later in the week we’ll share the experiences of some Whitman faculty members with publishing open access journal articles. Today’s blog post will outline the two main forms of open access for journal articles. Gold OA is delivered by publishers, while green OA is delivered by repositories.[1]
In the gold OA model, journals make peer-reviewed articles available without charge online upon publication. There are a variety of business models for gold OA, since free to access does not mean free of all costs to publish and preserve long-term. Some OA journals are funded through professional societies or a membership model. Others charge publication fees to the researchers. In some cases, publication fees are reduced or eliminated for researchers in the developing world or at under-resourced institutions. Individual journals may offer a so-called hybrid OA model: the journals charge a subscription fee, but offer authors the option of paying a fee to make their article available immediately online, free of charge to readers. A joint initiative between PLOS (the Public Library of Science), SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Institute) and OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association) has resulted in a useful chart of the spectrum of OA rights.
The green OA model is separate from the publishing of an article in a journal. In order to put their articles in an institutional or disciplinary repository, researchers must clarify their rights with the journals where they are publishing their work; journals have established policies that are available on their websites or in the RoMEO database. Most journals allow researchers to deposit a version of their article in an open-access repository, either as a preprint (the version of the article that the researcher submitted initially to the journal) or as a postprint (the version of the article accepted after peer review and revision). Some journals allow the deposited research article to include final copyedits and layout from the journal, while others do not. More and more academic libraries have a repository where faculty and students can make their scholarship available with a license of their choosing. The ARMINDA institutional repository is an option for green OA at Whitman College. For more information and links to OA resources, see our open access guide.
[1] Peter Suber, Open Access (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2012), 53. The terminology was coined by Stevan Harnad.