What is Open Access Publishing?

What is open access?

Open access (OA) started as a movement among dedicated reserachers, but is now accepted and have become almost as a norm in scholarly publishing. Many research funders require research results to be published open access. One of the core ideas behind OA is that publicly funded research should be openly and freely available for everybody.

Open access is often categorized as:

• Golden OA imply that the article is immediately freely available on the journal's website when published. The journal is OA in its entirety, which means that all articles are freely available. In some cases there is a fee involved, a so-called article processing charge (APC).
• Green OA imply that a the article is published in a license based journal, but a copy is deposited in an institutional repository (e.g. Dhanken) or in a subject repository (e.g. SSRN). The publisher defines which version of the article that is allowed to be deposited, usually a post-print version (accepted author's manuscript, peer reviewed) or a pre-print version (submitted version, not peer reviewed).
• Hybrid OA is an article published in a license based journal, but the author pays a fee in order to make the article freely available on the publishers website. 

Why open access?

Some benefits of open access:

• OA gives increased visibility, which leads to more downloads, more reads, more citations and more impact
• Publicly financed research is available also to business life and the general public, and can thereby drive innovation.
• OA contributes to global eqality by making it possible to access research, also for developing countries with limited resources to licensed databases.
• Research funders require research results to be publicly available.