Open access publishing is an alternative to the subscription model meaning that access to certain journals / articles is free either partially or fully to the user.
There are various broad types of open access:
If authors have signed a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA), the publisher's policy will determine which version of an article may be archived in a repository. Most publishers allow some sort of green open access. CTA's can be checked on the publisher website or SHERPA/RoMEO which does not contain information for all publishers but is a useful site.
1. OA journals are inferior -
no, many OA journals employ the same peer review processes as subscription journals and are of the same high quality
2. OA journals are not peer reviewed -
no, many OA journals do adopt peer review
3. OA journals take longer to get published in -
it does depend on the journal but often the turn around time is quicker.
4. OA journals are produced by predatory publishers -
no, many OA journals are produced by reputable publishers and included in databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect etc.
5. All open access journals charge author fees -
no, many publishers allow a version to be made freely available.
Most subscription databases include OA journals and the number of OA journals varies per discipline. When you search a database and get a results list you can see which journals are OA.
Copyright means the owner of property has a legal right to the intellectual property and only the owner of these rights is authorised to reproduce the work. Anyone else wanting to print, copy and distribute the work needs to seek permission from the copyright holder. Copyright is automatic once the work is published in some concrete form. You must put a copyright notice on your work: Copyright © (Year) name of author or institution
Copyright ownership means the copyright holder can decide on who can make copies; distribute the work; display the work publicly and make translations etc.
Copyright vests with the author but rights can be transferred to another party - some journals for example require authors to transfer article rights to them in terms of distribution.
If copyright restrictions are too severe, you have a choice to license your work as a Creative Commons work. Creative Commons is an international non profit organisation helping to build commons of shared knowledge. They provide CC licenses and public domain tools. Put the CC symbol (a closed circle with CC inside it) on your work and indicate the terms of use, copies, alter etc. The Creative Commons site helps you determine what kind of license you want. You can share on CC platforms, some of the best known CC platforms are Flickr; PLOS; Internet Archive; Wikipedia; YouTube
Digital repositories provide a vehicle for making open access materials accessible.
There are two basic types:
Institutional repositories - UKZN's Research Space is a digital repository for our Masters and PhD works as well as articles etc.
- Open journals - UKZN's collection of open access journals
International subject specific repositories - such as PubMed (medicine); arXiv.org (physics, maths, computer science, and science, quantitative biology, statistics, economics, electrical engineering); Internet Archive.
There are many more from organisations such as the UN, World Bank and subject specific ones.
Advantages of such repositories