Open Access: Home

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) provides a way to promote broader access to academic research outputs by scholars, students, professionals and the general public via the internet.

Open Access is the immediate, free of charge, online access to research articles. Users are able to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and link to the full text of open access articles. Open access research articles can be made available via archives, repositories and open access journals.

Open access can be achieved in a number of ways. Types of OA are:

Green Open Access

The author archives a full-text version of their article as accepted for publication in a scholarly journal. The copy of the article is deposited in an institutional or subject/discipline based repository and is freely available online.

Gold Open Access

The author publishes in an open access journal and the publisher’s website provides free immediate online access to the research article. In this model the author may, or may not, be required to pay a fee. For example, the author can pay the publisher of a scholarly journal an article processing fee where the publisher will then provide free online access to the full-text content of the journal. Variations of this business model include charges paid by an institution or a funding body, as opposed to the author. PLoS is an example of this model.

Another type of Gold Open Access is when the content of a journal is made freely available online only after a specified period of time.

Hybrid Open Access

The author pays an up-front fee to publish their article on the publisher’s website. Hybrid open access usually refers to immediate open access of individual papers, in subscription-based journals, where the author or the author’s institution has paid a fee to have their article made freely available online.

In this model, institutions are also paying to subscribe to the journal. This business model is often viewed as ‘double-dipping.’

Statement on Open Scholarship- Council of Australian University Librarians

Budapest Open Access Initiative

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber

OA does not by-pass peer-review

• OA focuses on providing access to peer reviewed journal articles
• OA journals utilise the same peer-review standards and procedures that subscription journals use

OA does not increase plagarism

• OA increases the chance that plagarism is recognised and exposed via more freely accessible material
• There are OA journals which have a high impact factor

OA archiving does not undermine journal viability

• There is no evidence that OA archiving causes journal cancellations
• OA institutional repositories are not a replacement for peer-reviewed journals

The F.A.I.R Principles stand for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable and are increasingly being applied to the outputs of research to ensure that everyone can find, read, use and reuse the outputs. Read the FAIR Statement.