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Open Access

This guide provides tips and resources for navigating the Open Access landscape.

OA Types

Open Access is complex because there are many different types of Open Access. Some involve authors or supporting institutions to pay Article Processing Charges (APC) to publish their scholarly works open access, while others do not require APCs to be paid by authors or their respective institutions. Open Access is constantly evolving towards fairness and to being more equitable. Although publishing in Gold or Hybrid OA is driven by APCs, new Open Access initiatives are emerging to make APC-free Green Open Access and Diamond Open Access a more accessible and viable option for today’s researchers.

The NIH Public Access mandates and the JHU Open Access Policy require that your scholarly work is made open access. Gold, Hybrid, and Diamond Open Access types comply with federal public access mandates. Green Open Access can also comply most times with federal public access mandates but double check with your funder.  The online resource SHERPA/Juliet is a tool that helps you to review your funder’s open access policies and check your grant agreement regarding depositing works in a repository.

OA Scope

Gold Open Access refers to articles in fully accessible OA journals. Publishing costs money, and while traditionally that money has come from subscriptions - a 'reader pays' model - Gold OA is an effort to explore alternative ways of paying for publishing.

  • Gold OA is an 'author pays' system, where publishing costs are supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs) paid by the author or by their institution through a membership or other model. 
  • Examples of Gold OA include PLoS (Public Library of Science) and BioMed Central publishers
  • Library support for Gold OA APCs

Journals that offer Hybrid Open Access are still fundamentally subscription journals with an OA option for individual articles.

  • The author or the institution pays twice for the same content in Hybrid OA; once from the author/funder/institution in the form of Article Processing Charges – APCs - and again from subscribers in the form of reading subscription fees.
    • This problem is often referred to as “publisher double dipping” as the institution is funding both subscription and publishing costs
  • Library support for Hybrid OA APCs

Green OA publishing refers to the self-archiving of published or pre-publication works for free public use. Authors provide access to preprints or post-prints (with publisher permission and often referred to as the Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM)) in an institutional or disciplinary archive/repository such as arXiv.org.

  • Green OA could look like this: 
    • Publish paywall and assert your author rights to deposit by depositing a version of your research output (e.g., AAM/post-print) in an online repository 
      • The 50+ year old Federal Purpose License was updated April 2024 to allow public access to agency-designated repositories; this would challenge publishers from charging no-embargo fees to AAM deposits in federal repositories for federally funded research.

      • Right now, there is pressure to get federal agencies to acknowledge the Federal Purpose License into their public access plans to comply with the OSTP Public Access Memo of 2022. This way, authors maintain their right to deposit their federally funded research in federal repositories at no extra no-embargo fee and they don’t risk a signing a conflicting publisher contract that could get them sued by their publisher for lying in their contract for not disclosing that the FPL applies to their paper.

  • Some reasons why people want to publish their pre-prints include:
    • Research can be disseminated immediately, without embargoes
    • Expands your readership through immediate and free access
    • By applying a Creative Commons license to your preprint, you are protecting your scholarly work from misuse or from improper attribution

How to Find an Appropriate Repository (Green OA)

  • OpenDOAR
    This is a directory of vetted online repositories that can help you find the appropriate repository to deposit some version of your works/manuscript.

Diamond Open Access journals are completely free to publish and to read – i.e., there are no APC fees.

  • The cost of maintaining and publishing the journal is usually borne by the organization that sponsors the journal
  • Diamond OA status has no impact on the journal's peer review process
  • By making articles completely free to both publish and to read, Diamond OA best approaches the goals of democratizing and widely distributing academic scholarship

Bronze Open Access makes research temporarily free to read on a publisher’s webpage, but without clarity on the specific licenses covering the article.

  • Bronze OA articles may be free to read due to a temporary publisher marketing initiative for example

What is Creative Commons, and why is it important?

  • Creative Commons, launched in 2001 as a non-profit organization, is an outcome of larger community movements, embracing the notions of freedom of sharing, reusing and modifying scholarly or artistic contents for knowledge re-creation and optimal utilization. Creative Commons in the scholarly communications environment becomes the Science Commons that ensures Open Access to research literature and research data.
  • There are 7 types of creative commons licenses that give you varying amounts of control over your work. The most common types of Creative Commons license are the CC-BY and the CC0.  Though, there are some types of data like sensitive data that may require more licensing restrictions for usage.  The Creative Commons License Chooser can help you choose a license that fits all your research needs. CC-BY 4.0 is the common Creative Commons license choice for many researchers, but the CC-BY-NC 4.0 is common license choice among JHU researchers.
  • If you need more assistance with finding the appropriate license to protect your scholarly work, please reach out Nancy Shin at nshin4@jhu.edu.

Public Domain - CC0

Attribution - CC-BY

Attribution-ShareAlike - CC-BY-SA

Attribution-NonCommercial - CC-BY-NC

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike - CC-BY-NC-SA

Attribution-NoDerivs - CC-BY-ND

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs - CC-BY-NC-ND

This section “About CC Licenses” by Creative Commons was used under the license CC-BY 4.0

 

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

Article Processing Charges (APCs) are fees that are paid by the author or their institution to publishers, in exchange for the publication of the manuscript on an Open Access basis (i.e., through Gold or Hybrid OA). Open Access publications are not locked behind a paywall (i.e., requires a paid subscription to gain access to content) to access the scholarly work and they often have an open license from one of the Creative Commons licenses (hyperlink to Creative Commons section of the LibGuide).

TIP #1:
You can budget APC charges into your funding application budget or even better, check out our section entitled “JHU Publishing Agreements Supporting OA” for OA agreements that Johns Hopkins Libraries has with various publishers. These relationships often manifest in APC waivers and discounts for JHU researchers who are the corresponding author on a publication.

TIP #2:
Another option is avoiding paying an APC altogether. When you publish with a Diamond OA journal your APC is automatically waived since Diamond OA does not charge fees to read and publish. Green Open Access is also another way to escape paying the hefty APC fees; recall in Green OA, some version of your manuscript is deposited in an online repository to read and publish.

Transformative Agreements (TAs) (Submenu Item 1)

Institutions, like libraries, are experimenting with publishers to create agreements and models to foot the cost of an APC or to provide an APC discount for scholarly work of corresponding authors that is primarily affiliated with their institution (e.g., Johns Hopkins University). These agreements are called “Read and Publish” or “Transformative Agreements”.  These and other kinds of agreements support ways in which publishers and libraries are experimenting with funding as traditional subscription publishing wanes and OA publishing increases. See below for more information about the nature of “Transformative Agreements”:

Transformative Agreements: Six Myths, Busted
This article is from the College and Research Libraries News. It provides a great overview to “Read and Publish” agreements or “Transformative Agreements”.

The Worst of Both Worlds: Hybrid Open Access
This 2018 OpenAIRE blogpost by Lisa Matthias captures the problematic nature of Hybrid Open Access, where some journal articles are Open Access and other are not.