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Open Access: Types

What is Open Access (OA)?

Open Access content is freely available to all and grants reuse rights to readers. Journal articles, books/chapters, or other types of scholarly content can all be OA. There are two main forms of Open Access: Green and Gold.

Green Open Access

  • Articles are published in a journal, but you retain the right to place it in an OA or other institutional repository at the same time.
  • The formatted, published article in the journal is immediately available to subscribers.
  • The manuscript version in the repository is available for free, but sometimes only after an embargo period (often 6-12 months) set by the journal.
  • You as an author can retain more of your rights through applying a Creative Commons (CC) license, meaning the content can be more freely distributed and shared.

Gold Open Access

  • The article is published in a journal that (usually) requires Article Processing Charges (APC's), which are paid for either by the author or by the school or funding institution.
  • The article is immediately available to all for free.
  • You as an author can retain more of your rights through applying a Creative Commons (CC) license, meaning the content can be more freely distributed and shared.

A so-called "hybrid" journal is not quite Green or Gold -- hybrid is when the entire journal is traditionally published, but you as an author can choose to pay an APC to make your individual article OA. 

Read here for more on the difference between Green and Gold

Benefits for Research

Open Access publishing benefits the researcher as well as the reader by: 

It has been used now for decades and by some counts, up to 80-90% of research at top-performing universities is already OA in some form.

 

Creative Commons licenses

OA content, both text and multimedia, is frequently published with Creative Commons (CC) licenses. CC licenses give you more control over how people can reuse your work:

  • CC-Attribution (CC-BY) -- any re-users must give you credit
  • CC-ShareAlike (CC-SA) -- others may remix, adapt, and build upon your work, as long as they give their new creation the same CC license as you use
  • CC-NoDerivs (CC-ND) -- others may reuse the work for any purpose, even commercially, but it cannot be shared with others
  • CC-NonCommercial (CC-NC) -- others may remix, adapt, and build upon your work in any non-commercial way, but they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms

You can also combine some of the above licenses, such as CC BY-NC-ND. Read more about the license options here.