Open access publishing

After finishing this part, you will…

• Understand the advantages of open access publishing.
• Be aware of the different options for open access publishing.
• Be familiar with some of the tools for finding OA journals and articles.
• Better recognize predatory journals.
• Know how to share your scientific papers responsibly.
• Be familiar with the open peer review process.

Open access – What is it?

Open access (OA) means that the material is freely available on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purposes.

The ideal situation is that, thanks to OA, all scientific results are exploitable for anyone interested in it, since this would promote positive advancement in science and in the whole society worldwide. In addition, it would save a variety of resources, e.g., time and money, because researchers would not need to rediscover the results already discovered somewhere else. Obviously, there are parties that have different points of view to OA publishing. Substantial publishers have offered (more or less) high-quality services and earned lots of money by charging subscriptions of journals for several decades; naturally, they don’t want to give up their income. On the other hand, there exist more and more dishonest publishers whose only ambition is to make as much money as possible. As a researcher, you should be aware of these aspects.

(8/2023 KH)

Move to the next page “Choosing a suitable option“