Open Access: All you need to know

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This is a narrative summary of the most important Open Access infos for researchers and part of the Münster Center for Open Science’s info materials.

Scientific results can be published in a variety of ways, and the available and used publication formats are becoming more diverse. Within the framework of a professional Open Science approach, researchers can be supported in deriving the optimal publication strategy for the respective case, given the tension between reputation, costs, quality assurance, and accessibility. This includes, for example:

MüCOS brings together expertise for the transparent publication of research results, in close coordination with existing specific offerings: The University and State Library Münster provides advice on Open Access and digital publishing, manages numerous Open Access journals, the publication server Miami, and offers guidance and support for the founding of new Open Access journals as well as the migration of journals to the journal management software Open Journal System.

Main Types of Open Access

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There are numerous types of open access that differ with respect to publication costs, reading costs, peer review status, and copyright ownership.

Diagram by Jamie-farquharson - https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21598179, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125787281

The following section lists and explains the most common Open Access types, along with MüCOS recommendations for their use.

Type Regulation Assessment in Terms of Accessibility and Cost of Knowledge
Diamond (Gold with APC = 0) All publications are freely accessible; no publication costs (Author/Book Processing Charges) are incurred. Positive
Gold All publications are freely accessible but there are publication costs (Article/Book/Chapter Processing Charges, i.e., APC/BPC/CPC). Positive if APC/BPCs are transparent and justifiable (e.g., €500 to finance a non-profit and cover type-setting costs).
Hybrid The journal operates under a subscription model (i.e., the university pays annual costs for access). For a fee, articles can be “bought out” and made Open Access; only these articles are free to read, others remain behind the paywall. Negative due to “double dipping” – universities pay twice: for the subscription (= reading access) plus Open Access.
Moving Wall The journal has a subscription model. After a specified period (typically between 6 and 48 months), the article becomes freely accessible. Negative: Research is slowed down, and especially financially weak individuals/institutions/countries are disadvantaged.
Promotional Selected publications are made freely available to promote the journal. Negative: Open Washing (the journal itself is not open and uses the model only for self-promotion).
Green Independently of the journal: authors exercise their right of secondary publication and upload the manuscript to the Internet. Depending on the publication contract, they may do this via their private homepage, an institutional repository, or pre-print servers. Policies can be checked per journal here. Positive if the published version can be re-published (identical to the original, thus easily citable); often only possible for the accepted manuscript or after an embargo period.
Closed Publications are only accessible against a one-time or recurring fee. Negative: Most research is conducted at the expense of society (i.e., funded by taxpayers) and should therefore be accessible to everyone.

For more information on Open Access types please see https://zenodo.org/records/8322048

Diamond or Closed+Green

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If possible, go for diamond OA. Otherwise, rather choose the closed option that does not have APCs and complement it with publishing the preprint.

If you have the choice between different journals and OA types, open access is generally recommended. Note, however, that you may be expected to publish in prestigious journals to advance your scientific career. Diamond open access journals sometimes do not meet certain field-specific criteria such as a certain Journal Impact Factor, driving you towards commercial journals. These often have open access paths and closed paths. For these cases, we recommend choosing the closed path because it does not involve any additional costs and supplement it with publishing the preprint. To see which version you can upload to a preprint server, check the Open Policy Finder.

Choosing a Preprint Server

If you decide to upload a preprint, beware that there are different types of preprint servers.

  • Non-profit preprint repositories are managed by scientific communities. They are moderated by researchers and the respective communities’ values are aligned with scientific ideals. Examples are Zenodo.org, Arxiv.org, and osf.io/preprints.

  • Commercial preprint repositories are owned by publishers. They may be moderated by non-researchers or bots and they prioritize profit. They may be used to create lock-in effects for researchers using them (e.g., nudging users to submit to journals from the respective publisher).

We recommend choosing a non-profit preprint server. For a comprehensive list of preprint repositories, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preprint_repositories.

Open Access and Quality: Predatory Publishing

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Open Access is not a business model. Predatory publishers use the Gold Open Access model to generate review while not conducting proper peer-reviwe.

While the idea of open access is for research to be available online for free and without any restrictions (e.g., required log-in or paywall), commercial publishers have recommercialized the idea. This is usually referred to as Gold Open Access and involves Article Processing Charges (APCs). That is, authors have to pay the journal to get their article published. APCs are positively correlated with journal citation impact and exceed justified costs by far. Due to researchers’ pressure to publish, some journals offer publication against a fee and provide insufficient quality assurance. For example, peer review may be falsified or revisions may not actually be required to address peer reviewers’ comments. This creates the picture of a high-quality peer reviewed journal when it is actually merely a very expensive service to publish any article. Publishers engaging in these practices have also had aggressive marketing strategies such as emailing authors with requests to submit their article to their journal, advertising impact factors, forcing authors to include articles from their journal in the citations to artificially increase the impact factor, and reward researchers for reviews with coupons that allow them to waive APCs in said journals. Another feature of predatory journals has been low variance in turn over times and a large number of special issues (e.g., >300 special issues per year).

Think-Check-Submit

To assess whether a journal is predatory, you can follow these steps:

  1. Follow the recommendations by Think-Check-Submit and COPE.

  2. Check the Norwegian Scientific Index if the journal or publisher is academic.

  3. Further resources such as the DOAJ (has a very low bar for journals to be indexed) or the website Predatory Journals (has anonymous authors and intransparent rating systems) may provide additional insights.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Publishing

In many fields, established and prestigious journals are owned by commercial journals and - although researchers are usually members of the editorial board - they can be pressured by the publisher to lower quality standards. This has led to conflicts and resignations of entire editorial boards. In other words, early career researchers’ academic success can rely on publications in prestigious and expensive journals. For example, a publication in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior costs more than € 10,000.00. Researchers may arrive at the decision between a low-prestige diamond OA journal and a high-prestige gold OA (or closed access) journal. Institutions are currently revising their research evaluation (e.g., SF DORA, CoARA) but are relatively likely to reward publications in high impact journals over open access publications.

Further Information