About This Page
This page answers frequently asked questions about Open Access. It includes information about the open access movement, the technicalities and challenges surrounding Open Access, and how Open Access impacts faculty and students.
For information on a specific subject area, click on the subject in the On This Page box.
Beall's List of Predatory Open Access Publishers
"Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process."
Open Access
On This Page
What are the origins of the open access Movement?
If Open Access is free to the reader, who pays for it?
How do author's cover fees that may be charged?
What is the relationship between Open Access and copyright?
How scholarly are open access journals?
What is the relationship between Open Access and repositories?
How is Open Access valuable for faculty and students?
How does the uWaterloo Library support Open Access?
All About Open Access
What is Open Access?
“Open access” is the term used to describe scholarly literature available on-line free of charge. Such literature may be freely copied, distributed and used with proper attribution.
While there are variations among formal definitions, the Budapest Open Access Initiative explains that the literature includes peer reviewed journal articles as well as unreviewed preprints that scholars “might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings. There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By open access to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”
What are the Origins of the Open Access Movement?
Open access initiatives can be traced back to the mid-1960s; one of the earliest efforts, Project Gutenberg was launched in 1971. By the 1990s, with the increased availability of the Internet, several issues greatly advanced open access:
• the development of open source software
• the creation of open access repositories by scholars (e.g., arXiv, for physics pre-prints) and institutions (e.g., UWSpace, for UW theses)
• the public’s desire to access results of publicly-funded research without paying again (in 1997, the U.S. National Institutes of Health launched the free digital archive: Pubmed Central)
• the escalation of journal subscription costs
Open access principles have continued to gain the support of governments, scholarly societies, educational institutions, and libraries world-wide. Countless organized campaigns, declarations, and group initiatives such as those of the Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin open access meetings in 2002 and 2003 and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have advanced the movement. As of 2010, open access repositories and journals number in the thousands.
If Open Access is free to the reader, who pays for it?
In the open access model, publishers cover their costs in a variety of ways, such as:
• Charging authors a fee to publish in their journals
• Selling memberships to institutions; a membership may reduce the amount that authors from the institution need to pay to publish in a journal
• Receiving subsidies from a university or scholarly society that hosts the journal. In such cases the university or society may generate funds for open access publications by selling other publications; through advertising fees; and/or by providing fee based add-ons.
• Charging subscription fees for print copies and using those funds to cover costs for both print and open access
• Charging subscription fees for both print and immediate electronic access and delaying open access until sometime later, e.g. 6-12 months
• Publishing both fee-based and open-access articles in the same journal, and charging author fees for the latter
How do authors cover fees that may be charged?
• They might be able to use grant funding
• If their institution has established a special fund in support of Open Access, authors might apply to that fund
• If their institution has memberships with open access publishers, fees may be reduced or waived
• Some open access publishers may waive author fees for those who simply cannot afford them, typically researchers in developing nations
What is the relationship between Open Access and copyright?
Open Access adheres to existing copyright law. The copyright owners of the intellectual property (e.g. research paper, data sets, educational resources, videocasts, etc.) own the rights to reproduce or publish the work. In the open access model, authors permit free access to their work for scholarly use, with proper attribution. To fit within the definition of Open Access, permissions should include the right to copy and distribute the work. Authors may grant more permissions by appending a Creative Commons license or other open access license to their work. Additional permissions could include commercial use and the right to produce derivative works . Authors retain the right to control having their works distributed in an inaccurately altered or misattributed form.
How scholarly are open access journals?
The term Gold Open Access is used to describe scholarly open access journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ, currently lists over 4,000 titles in their directory. Journals listed in DOAJ cover a wide range of disciplines and are subject to peer review or “editorial quality control”. Ulrich’s periodical directory also lists open access journals and also currently lists over 4,000 such publications.
The term Green Open Access refers to journal articles that are made freely available via subject-based or institutional repositories. Authors are not charged to self-archive in these repositories and content does not go through a peer review process upon submission to an archive or repository. A significant aspect of Green Open Access is the deposit of articles reporting on research funded by agencies and sponsors mandating open access to research results.
SHERPA’s RoMEO project uses additional colours to identify publishers who place restrictions on open access contributions.
What is the relationship between Open Access and repositories?
A repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating in digital format the intellectual output of a discipline or of an institution, particularly a research institution.
The intellectual output could include material such as journal articles, before and after peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations. It might also include other digital assets generated by academic life such as administrative documents and records; course notes; learning objects; or raw data.
The Directory of Open Access Repositories or OpenDOAR lists over 1500 institutional repositories, subject-based repositories, and repositories set up by funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health in the US and the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe.
Such repositories can be open access compliant to encourage, or require, faculty members to deposit their research output. For example, all research papers generated from Canadian Institutes of Health Research funded projects must be freely accessible through the publisher's website or an online repository within six months of publication.
UWSpace, the institutional repository for the University of Waterloo, currently houses an OA collection of University of Waterloo theses as well as ENGINE, an OA repository of e-prints from the journal Transactions of Vehicular Technology.
Who pays for repositories?
The costs of developing and maintaining repositories are usually covered by the host institution and individuals are responsible for adding their material.
How is Open Access valuable for faculty and students?
Open access publications increase the breadth and depth of information available to faculty and students at no cost to either themselves or to the Library. Open access literature can ease the inflationary pressures of journal subscription costs on library budgets, allowing funds to be redirected to other materials. In addition, when students leave the University they continue to have access to these publications and may find them useful in their work, or other endeavors.
Open access journals review and publish faculty and student research faster and more transparently (e.g., peer reviewers may be known). With a shorter publishing cycle, science and medicine, for example, progress faster.
Through open access publications, faculty research can reach new audiences around the world and new research partners can be identified e.g. interdisciplinary, corporate, underfunded and independent researchers. Spreading research to these new readers may increase UW’s research profile and graduate student recruitment.
Since open access research results are readily available to the general public, taxpayers have the opportunity to see some of the contributions of scholars to society.
Students and faculty also benefit from new methods of scholarly communication inspired by Open Access, for example:
• Dark Data of Failed Experiments - unpublished data
• H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online - interdisciplinary organization of scholars dedicated to developing the educational potential of the Internet
• Jurn - Search tool for open access Humanities journals
• Open Notebook Science - primary record of a research project is recorded and made publically available online
How does the uWaterloo Library support Open Access?
The Library has a number of memberships with organizations that support Open Access. Such memberships typically fund the continued development and operation of these organizations. Some memberships include author processing fee discounts for the institution’s authors. Current memberships are:
• arXiv – Cornell University; over 612,000 e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics
• Bioline International - a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries
• BioMed Central (Supporter Membership) - the publisher of over 200 peer-reviewed open access journals; Waterloo authors get a 15% author processing fee discount on any article they publish into BioMed Central Journals
• DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals annual membership
• PLoS Public Library of Science
• SPARC Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
What are the challenges facing Open Access?
There are a number of challenges:
• Is the OA market too small to survive? Only a few institutions worldwide have mandated OA as a means of publishing and archiving academic research.
• Is there a loss of ‘value-added’ aspects with OA?
• Is the peer-review process the same as with subscription journals? The peer-review process is integral to academic publishing, and authors and the public need to have confidence that this process is the same.
• Does Green-OA follow copyright laws? There is general acceptance that the author-pays model adheres to copyright laws, but there is a concern that the rules can be easily broken in repositories.
• Is there long-term, viable storage for digital documents? Technologies change quickly and how will OA publishers and repositories adjust? Will OA publishers provide perpetual access to articles and academic documents?
• Does a completely OA model have financial sustainability? Have the costs of providing OA access been under-estimated by OA publishers and institutions?
• Who ultimately pays to fund faculty publications? Are researchers using institutionally-provided funds, and if so, how does this re-allocation of funds affect department and library budgets?
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