Open Access & Scholarly Communication: OA Journals & Books

The main and most permanent venues for open access are repositories and journals.

There are two main types of Open Access journals,

• Green Open Access Journals that give authors permission to self-archive in some way:
  • usually in an institutional (DigitalCommons@Linfield) or disciplinary repository (arXiv). 
  • author pays a fee to have article published OA immediately in a subscription-based journal (Taylor & Francis Open Select).
• Gold journals that provide immediate access to articles but the author or author's institution pays a fee at the time of publication (PLoS). The New Wave of Gold OA Journals.

Harnad, S. and others. (2008). The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Road to Open Access: an update.

Free access and rights to re-use content.

• Gratis refers to free access to online articles.
• Libre includes Gratis and some re-use rights.

Further reading about this ongoing discussion:

• Peter Suber's discussion Gratis and Libre in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter August 2, 2008
• Post on Nature Blog by Mike Taylor (with comments by Steven Harnad) May 3, 2012
• Royster, P. (2012). Up from Under the “Open Access” Bus. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 1(2):eP1045. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1045

These myths about open access are all FALSE.

1. OA journals are not peer-reviewed
2. All OA journals charge authors
3. “Author pays” is a “vanity press” model
4. OA violates copyright law
5. OA literature is free to produce
6. OA is a business model
7. OA is a type of content or license
8. OA is only about journal articles

(Content from Isaac Gilman (2009), Open Access in 15 Minutes (or less), used under a Creative Commons Public Domain certification.)