Let’s first talk about the traditional publishing model. In this model the authors of a scientific paper can submit it to the journal and publish it for free; they don’t have to pay anything. So where does the journal make its money? In the traditional model the journal is making its money or its profit from subscription fees from individual subscribers, university libraries, or company libraries. When you publish using the traditional model, the journal then owns the copyright to that publication, an important consideration for some people. Do you want to have control of the copyright or do you want to hand that over to the journal?

There are some problems with this traditional publishing model. The first one is that not all universities can afford to subscribe to every journal. Thus, sometimes students, faculty, or staff don’t have ready access to the research articles that they need for their own research. In that case, someone will have to pay for access to that journal article.  You may have tried to access an article and found that it is behind a paywall. Paying this fee is one way to get access. Another way is for a university library to request the article from other libraries, and they have to pay to do that. Either the scientist is going to pay or the scientist’s employer is going to pay to get access to that article.

A second problem with the traditional publishing model is for people that are not affiliated with any university. They can’t go to a university library and ask for access, so they have to pay out of pocket, or find some other way to get that article. Most scientific research is funded through grants from federal institutions like the NIH, the NSF, the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense. These funds are taxpayer dollars, yet with traditional publishing the taxpayers can’t see the results of the research that their money is funding, a problem for society.

The third problem of the traditional publishing model I’ve already brought up earlier, and that is the issue of copyright. When you sign over your copyright to the journal, you can’t freely distribute your article because you don’t own the copyright to it, even though you wrote it. You can’t just give the article to anybody that asks for it (legally) and you can’t legally publish it on your web page. Now there are some exceptions to this. Certain traditional publishers will let you distribute your article by PDF after an embargo period. Or they might allow you to archive a different version of the article, like a pre-publication version, for example.

People recognized these problems with the traditional publishing model, and the Open Access model originated to address some of these problems. Open Access means that anyone with an internet connection can download and read and distribute any of the publications in an Open Access journal. It is free for the readers. You don’t have to pay an access fee, the university library doesn’t have to pay an access fee, it’s free to you as a reader. In terms of copyright, typically the author retains the copyright when they publish with Open Access, because the articles are made available under a Creative Commons license, and so that license allows anyone to freely use that article in any way they want to, as long as they attribute the authors of that article, Also, because the authors retain the copyright, they can archive the article any way they want. And so self-archiving of the final version is allowed, as opposed to the traditional publishing model where self-archiving is usually not the final version, it’s usually a pre-publication version.

But one of the big drawbacks of Open Access is that the authors have to pay to publish, in contrast to the traditional model where it was free for the authors to publish. In the Open Access model the authors have to pay to publish; there are some exceptions and we’ll get to that. The authors pay what is known as an APC, article processing charge, which is anywhere from typically $1000 US up to more than $10,000 US. On average, APCs are around $2,800 – $3,000 US in 2021. So, it’s pretty expensive. Where does this money come from? At certain universities, the department or the institution has some funds they set aside to pay for a certain number of Open Access publications. Alternatively, the authors might get the money from a grant that they have been awarded, or they find the money somewhere else. There may be times when the authors pay out of their pocket. A lot of Open Access publishers will give discounts up to 100% to authors in certain developing countries. So, if you’re in one of those countries check with your target journal and see if you can get a discount.

There are different types of Open Access. The first type is the one that I’ve been describing, the pay to publish model, also known as Gold Open Access. With Gold Open Access journals, authors have to pay to publish, but there are no subscription fees. The Gold Open Access journals are fully Open Access; every article published in them is Open Access. Another type of Open Access journal is the hybrid journal, where Open Access is optional. In the hybrid journals, you can publish using the traditional model where it’s free for you, but it’s not free for the readers, or you can publish using an Open Access model where the author pays and it is free for the readers. Another type of access called Green Open Access. Green Open Access doesn’t really depend on the journal’s business model; it means is that the article is put into a repository where anyone can access that article for free. The Open DOAR or the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories has a list of repositories.

A fourth model of Open Access is called the Diamond model. Diamond Open Access journals are free for the readers, and they’re also free for the authors. The authors don’t have to pay, the readers don’t have to pay, who has to pay? Somebody has to pay, because there are costs associated with running a website with processing articles and publishing them, and maintaining all of that infrastructure. Diamond Open Access is paid for by donors. The donors might be institutions, like universities or foundations, or they might be individuals

Let’s talk about the positives and negatives of Open Access publishing as compared to traditional publishing. One of the positives is the articles are no cost for readers, and so Open Access journals typically have a higher citation rate than non-Open Access journals. It’s not a huge difference, but there is a difference. Another positive is that the people ultimately funding the research, the taxpayers of that country, have access to the results of the research. As for negatives of Open Access: it’s expensive for the authors. When I was a professor with my own research lab, there were times when I didn’t have grant money, but I needed to publish, so I had to decide whether to publish traditionally or find some funds in my budget by diverting them from research supplies into publishing fees. It was a hardship for my lab. Another negative is the other side of the coin of taxpayers having access to the research that they funded; now they have to pay for the publication fees, too. So, it’s actually going to be inflationary. As Open Access becomes more prominent and researchers are write Open Access fees into their grant proposals, the price is going to keep going up and up. A third negative of publishing Open Access: the free Diamond Open Access journals are not very well known and/or they have a low impact factor. Maybe that will change and Diamond Open Access will take off and the impact factors will increase. But for now, if impact factor is something that’s important to you the Diamond Open Access journal may not meet that need.

Do you have additional thoughts or questions about Open Access? Leave a comment below! And check out the Grants and Publications YouTube channel.