27 Facts About Open access

Open access is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers.

Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterised by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on author fees or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships.

Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, monographs, research reports and images.

Since the revenue of most open access journals is earned from publication fees charged to the authors, OA publishers are motivated to increase their profits by accepting low-quality papers and by not performing thorough peer review.

Different open access types are currently commonly described using a colour system.

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Bronze open access articles are free to read only on the publisher page, but lack a clearly identifiable license.

Journals which publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA.

Gratis open access refers to online access free of charge, and libre open access refers to online access free of charge plus some additional re-use rights.

In 2012, the number of works under libre open access was considered to have been rapidly increasing for a few years, though most open-access mandates did not enforce any copyright license and it was difficult to publish libre gold OA in legacy journals.

One example of this is the Subscribe to Open publishing model introduced by Annual Reviews; if the subscription revenue goal is met, the given journal's volume is published open access.

Advantages and disadvantages of open access have generated considerable discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, editorial staff and society publishers.

Some open access journals generate revenue by charging publication fees in order to make the work openly available at the time of publication.

No-fee open access journals, known as "platinum" or "diamond" do not charge either readers or authors.

Open access began to be sought and provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility itself was opened by the advent of Internet and the World Wide Web.

Premises behind open access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review standards of quality while making the following changes:.

An obvious advantage of open access journals is the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library and improved access for the general public; this is especially true in developing countries.

The open access movement is motivated by the problems of social inequality caused by restricting access to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions with the financial means to purchase access to many journals, as well as the economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of academic publishing.

Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to.

Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle.

Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play a very important role in responding to open-access mandates from funders.

The Association of Research Libraries has documented the need for increased Open access to scholarly information, and was a leading founder of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition .

In developing nations, open access archiving and publishing acquires a unique importance.

The SciELO, is a comprehensive approach to full open access journal publishing, involving a number of Latin American countries.

Open access articles are typically cited more often than equivalent articles requiring subscriptions.

ROAD synthesizes information about open access journals and is a subset of the ISSN register.

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Since 2003 efforts have been focused on open access mandating by the funders of research: governments, research funding agencies, and universities.

Open access publishing has many advantages in the present publishing system and can help female researchers increase their publications' visibility and measure impact.