Open access (2 hours)

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In traditional journal publishing, authors do not pay anything. Authors send papers to journals and journals publish them for free. There are two ways readers can read the article: either the reader pays directly (many articles nowadays cost $30 USD or more to download—I don't recommend you ever do this, because there are always other ways to get access), or the reader gets access via a library subscription (university libraries pay millions of dollars per year to maintain their subscriptions to journals).

In recent years, many people have criticized the traditional publishing model, and argued that readers should not need to pay to read articles. There are two main reasons for this:

  1. Many people believe information should be free to the general public;
  2. Most research is funded by the government (for example, if you are receiving a PhD fellowship to pursue your research, much of that money is coming from the government), meaning it is funded by the taxpayers. Thus, making taxpayers pay to fund research, and then making them pay again to read it, seems unfair. Since taxpayers funded the research, they should be able to read the results.

For an accessible overview of some of these issues, as well as an interesting history of how scientific publishing got to be the way it is today, you can check out the Guardian article "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?".

All this has led to growing support in recent years for open access publishing. Open access is a model in which readers anywhere in the world can read an article for free. There are two main ways this is done:

  1. "Gold" open access: The authors [usually] pay some fee for the publisher to make the article freely available. Anyone who goes to the website of the journal will be able to read the article directly, without needing to pay or log in. (If a journal article is not gold open access, then when you try to click to download it you will meet a paywall—a website asking you to pay money in order to access it. If an article is gold open access, you will just immediately see the full-text, or a link to download the PDF.)
  2. "Green" open access (sometimes called "self-archiving"): After an article is published in a journal, even if the article is not gold open access, the author can post a free PDF of it somewhere else—for example on their personal website, on a social media platform such as ResearchGate, on a repository within their university (such as the PolyU Institutional Research Archive), etc. Thus, even if someone can't freely download the article from the official journal website, they can freely download it from one of those other places. For example, when you search for articles on Google Scholar, sometimes the links you find are links to the official journal article, and sometimes they're links to one of these other places. Some journals have strict copyright rules not letting authors upload the official PDF of the article in other places; in these situations, the author sometimes uploads the Accepted Author Manuscript (the version of the article that was accepted by the journal but not yet gone through proper formatting to look like a professional author; this often looks like a crappy Microsoft Word document) instead. Some journals don't even allow these, or only allow them after a certain amount of time (an "embargo") passes; but in our field these are the minority.

Some entire journals are fully gold open access—meaning that every article published in those journals is free to download. Other journals have no open access at all—every article must be paid for, either directly by the reader, or by the library. Finally, other journals are hybrid—most of their articles must be paid for, but some are gold open access, because the authors have the choice to pay a fee to make them open access if they want to. There are also other variations, such as "diamond" or "platinum" open access (where neither the readers nor the authors have to pay anything—from the perspective of a reader, these are functionally equivalent to "gold" open access).

When people talk about open access publishing, they often conflate these concepts. People often say things like "open access is too expensive" or "open access is not scientific because journals just accept anything as long as the authors pay" or "I would like to publish my papers open-access, but I don't have enough funding to pay for it". These statements are not strictly true: they are only referring to gold open access. Green open access (e.g., posting a PDF of your paper on ResearchGate, or making your own website with Google Sites or Github Pages, etc., and posting a PDF of your paper there) costs authors nothing.

Find examples of the following four types of papers:

  1. A paper that is not open access
  2. A green open access paper
  3. A gold open access paper, published in a hybrid journal
  4. A gold open access paper, published in a fully open-access journal

(Hint: my own website includes examples of #2, #3, and #4).

Imagine you are writing a paper and you have sufficient funding in your project to pay for gold open-access publishing. You want to publish it gold open-access, in either a fully open-access journal or a hybrid open-access journal. (One benefit of publishing gold open-access instead of green open-access is that the paper may be easier to find. When a paper is green open-access, readers can't read it directly on the journal website; they have to know to check Google Scholar, ResearchGate, etc. to find the free version. Also the free version they find might not be the nice-looking, nicely formatted final journal paper; it might be an ugly Microsoft Word draft. However, with gold open-access, people can view the nice-looking version from the official website with a single click. This makes it easier for other researchers to read—and cite—your work.

What is a journal in your field that you could submit this paper to?

How much money might it cost to publish a paper as gold open access? You may consider the journal you listed in the previous question, or other journals that offer gold open access.

What do you think about open access? If you publish a paper in the future, which way do you think you would like to publish it? Why?

When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "Registered reports".

by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-05-05. CC-BY-4.0.