Options for open access publishing

Define your priorities

Do you want a wide readership? Do you want an expert impact? Do you work on a project whose funder demands open access? When you are choosing a suitable option for your scientific publication, you must consider your audience, your study and career purposes and requirements of the organisation and the funder. Many universities and funders around the world require research results to be published with open access within the limits of agreements and laws.

Openness brings a scientist more merits since openly accessible scientific publications are cited more often than articles published only in subscription-based journals. The open publishing of research findings promotes the visibility of the work, utility and impact and increases opportunities for co-operation. You can get good tips from colleagues, so it is a good idea to discuss the suitable publication channels with them.

Many publishers and research funders have also adapted to the shift toward open access publishing. Major international commercial publishers (e.g., Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley) have adopted hybrid or fully open access (gold OA) models. While they offer OA options, these often involve high article processing charges (APCs), which has drawn criticism due to the cost and limited reduction in overall expenses.

In scholarly societies and smaller publishers, in general, the trend is clearly moving toward openness. In Finland, Journal.fi platform (maintained by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, TSV) hosts Finnish scientific journals, which are openly accessible immediately or after an embargo.

Also universities and research funders have a role. Universities, like UEF, promote open access publishing in their open science policies – either by publishing in OA journals or through self-archiving. Researchers are also supported by offering APC benefits. Usually, universities have open access publishing agreements with publishers. In Finland, for example, FinELib negotiates national agreements that often cover APCs for researchers at participating institutions. Research funders, such as the Research Council of Finland, mandate open access to research outputs.

Most known open publishing options for scientific articles

Gold open access (Gold OA)

The articles/books are immediately published on the journal’s/publisher’s website, and these publications are accessible to everyone and free of charge to all readers. In these journals, there is a reliable peer review process and, often, they have an author/article processing charge (APC), which covers publisher’s costs and must be paid by the researcher, research organisation or funder. There is a book processing charge (BPC) for books.

Be sure to allocate sufficient resources for article processing charges already during the planning phase of your research. The Research Council of Finland, as an example, accepts APC fees if the article is published in a gold open access journal or in a hybrid journal that is part of transformative agreements (e.g., FinELib agreements). Self-archiving is also accepted. Fully open access journals can be found, for example, in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) database. Many organisations have special APC benefits for researchers. At UEF, see Open Access Agreements and Journal Search Tool to see what kind of APC benefits are available.

Out of curiosity, check Open APC service to see fees paid for open access journal articles by universities and research institutions. Click the map and select an organization to find the APC costs data. The Open APC dataset includes APCs of both gold and hybrid journals.

Hybrid publishing

The article is published in a subscription-based journal, and this single article is opened by paying extra fees (APC). In this publishing model there are charges for both the subscription and for opening an article. This is called “double dipping”, and hopefully this OA option disappears soon.

However, many organisations have so-called transformative agreements with publishers. The transformative agreements include hybrid journals, and the aim of the agreements is to transform the hybrid journals into fully open access journals when certain criteria are met. These transformative deals usually include open access publishing in the agreement’s journals without APCs for the author or with discounted APCs.

Diamond open access (Diamond OA)

Recently, the rising APC costs have drawn criticism from the scientific community and strengthened the push toward cost-free open access publishing, known as diamond open access. Diamond open access involves no fees for authors or readers. Diamond model journals are often funded by universities, libraries, or scholarly societies, and they are gaining popularity especially in the social sciences and humanities. However, it has its challenges.

For more information about the diamond model, read Diamond future of open access (Linna et al., 2023).

Green open access (Green OA)

The articles are published in a subscription-based journal, but the publisher allows self-archiving (rinnakkaistallentaa, in Finnish) of your article. The same may apply with books too. The self-archived copy is available e.g. via organisational (e.g. UEF eRepository) or discipline-specific publication repository (e.g. arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv). Self-archiving must be agreed upon between the authors and the publisher.

Often the publisher can have set restrictions related to self-archiving and these restrictions must be obeyed. There might be an embargo period before you can publish your publication on the repository. Self-archiving is free of charge for authors, so it might be a good option especially if you don’t have a budget for APC fees.

Self-archiving in practice

Many universities have set up their own institutional publication repositories to allow their researchers to deposit their publications for free. If you’re not sure whether your institution has a repository, check with your library.

At UEF, self-archiving will be taken care of by the library after you submit your publication information to UEF CRIS research database and attach the final draft or published version of your article to the publication form (Login to UEF CRIS -> Submit a new publication). The UEF library will take care of the rest. So, you don’t need to worry about embargos or the actual self-archiving. You just submit the publication details and the final draft/publisher pdf to the library via UEF CRIS. Read more about self-archiving and the UEF eRepository.

If you don’t have access to an institutional or discipline-specific repository to self-archive your publications, you can upload them to a general/multidisciplinary open access repository, like Zenodo (OA repository for different research outputs created by OpenAIRE and CERN) or Preprints (MDPI, publisher of open access journals).

Zenodo in a nutshell

Accepts any kind of research output from all disciplines.
Uploads are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to make them easily discoverable and uniquely citeable.
Research outputs are stored safely for longer-term preservation.

Social networking sites (e.g. ResearchGate, Academia.edu) can be great for boosting the visibility of your work but they are not OA repositories. It is a better idea to self-archive your publication to an OA repository and then link to it from social networking sites.

Other open access repositories

Also, these registries can be used to find information about the repositories throughout the world:

Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
OA Directory (list of discipline-specific repositories)

What and when?

What to self-archive?

At UEF, the library guides you with questions related to self-archiving and takes care of the actual self-archiving (incl. opening it after the potential embargo period) when you report your publications to UEF CRIS. Depending on the publisher, different versions of the manuscript can be self-archived. UEF self-archives only final drafts and publisher’s PDFs (OA publications) to UEF eRepository, depending on the publisher’s requirements. In some disciplines, such as physics and computer science, preprints have a long-standing tradition.

Preprint – Manuscript. The version of the article before peer-review. By publishing a preprint, researchers can demonstrate that they were the first to make a particular discovery or propose an idea. Preprints may receive citations before formal publication. However, it is important to remember that preprints have not been peer-reviewed, so their quality may vary. Also, check from the potential publisher that sharing preprints early on is ok.
Final draft – The version that has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publishing, but which does not have the final layout of the journal. The final draft is also called a post-print, pre-proof or accepted author manuscript (AAM). The term “post” in post-print refers to peer-review, not the actual printing. In the same logic, a pre-print is the version before the peer-review. The version with page numbers and publisher logos is no longer a final draft version.
Publisher’s PDF – The final published version of the article with the layout of the journal.

When to self-archive?

Research funders and organisations may require that OA must be ensured immediately or after a certain embargo period. Often the acceptable embargos defined by research funders are:

GREEN OA – Usually 6 months (except 12 months for social sciences and humanities).
GOLD OA – Immediately.

Some journals require longer embargo periods. Jisc’s Open policy finder (formerly Sherpa Romeo) can be used e.g. for checking journals’ OA policies and embargo periods. It is important to note the possible embargos when choosing a suitable journal for your article.

So, there might be an embargo before your article can be openly published on the repository. But in most repositories, you can (and in case of UEF eRepository, you should) still report your publication immediately after publishing. The article will be fully available to others after the embargo period.

Plan S

Plan S is an initiative for open access publishing launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of national research agencies and funders from 11 European countries. Plan S requires scientists and researchers who benefit from publicly funded research to publish their work in open repositories or in open access journals.

Plan S is structured around ten principles. The key principle is that from the beginning of 2021, scientific publications must be published in open access journals or platforms, or made immediately available in open access repositories without an embargo period.

The ten principles are:

Authors or their institutions retain copyright to their publications. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), in order to fulfill the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration.
The funders will develop robust criteria and requirements for the services that high-quality open access journals, open access platforms, and open access repositories must provide.
In cases where high-quality open access journals or platforms do not yet exist, the funders will, in a coordinated way, provide incentives to establish and support them when appropriate. Support will also be provided for open access infrastructures, where necessary.
Where applicable, open access publication fees are covered by the funders or research institutions, not by individual researchers. It is acknowledged that all researchers should be able to publish their work open access.
The funders support the diversity of business models for open access journals and platforms. When open access publication fees are applied, they must be commensurate with the publication services delivered and the structure of such fees must be transparent to inform the market and funders potential standardisation and capping of payments of fees.
The funders encourage governments, universities, research organisations, libraries, academies, and learned societies to align their strategies, policies, and practices to ensure transparency.
The above principles shall apply to all types of scholarly publications, but it is understood that the timeline to achieve open access for monographs and book chapters will be longer and requires a separate and due process.
The funders do not support the ‘hybrid’ model of publishing. However, as a transitional pathway towards full open access within a clearly defined time frame, and only as part of transformative arrangements, funders may contribute to financially supporting such arrangements.
The funders will monitor compliance and sanction non-compliant beneficiaries/grantees.
The funders commit that when assessing research outputs during funding decisions they will value the intrinsic merit of the work and not consider the publication channel, its impact factor (or other journal metrics), or the publisher.

Test the Journal Checker Tool (JCT, by cOAlition S)! The JCT is a web-based tool which provides clear advice to researchers on how they can comply with their funder’s Plan S-aligned Open Access policy when seeking to publish in their chosen journal.

Also, a set of recommendations regarding academic books – in line with Plan S principles – that all cOAlition S organisations will seek to adopt within their own remits and jurisdictions, has been formulated. See: cOAlition S statement on Open Access for academic books (Plan S, 2021).

Other types of scientific publications, such as non-peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings and ‘grey literature’ (i.e. informally published material not having gone through a standard publishing process, e.g. reports), are not covered by the OA obligation. However, to ensure fuller and wider access, researchers are encouraged to also provide OA to these other types of scientific publications, where possible.

Remember:

OA journals (Gold and Diamond OA) and self-archiving via publication repositories (Green OA) are the best options for OA publishing.
Self-archiving is recommended even if you are publishing in an OA journal.
Plan S requires scientists and researchers who benefit from publicly funded research to publish their work in open repositories or in open access journals.

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