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Open Scholarship Toolkit

Benefits of Open Access Articles

Unrestricted access to, and reuse of, published journal articles benefits the research community by facilitating the dissemination of new information, thus maximizing opportunities for that work to lead to new insights and discoveries.

(From Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices: Proceedings of a Workshop which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0))

Gold Open Access

Quite simply, Gold OA is open access facilitated by a publisher. But just because there's "gold" in the name doesn't make it the best or only way to make your research open. How you decide to share your research will depend on many factors, including who is funding your grant, the nature of your research, your career goals, the norms of your department and academic discipline, your personal thoughts about sharing your work, and a host of other factors. See Open Access Agreements for more on Gold OA publishing supported by the UI Libraries.

Shades of Gold

While Gold OA is always publisher facilitated, there are different ways they make work open. Here are the basic models that publishers follow:

  • Publisher funded OA – In this model, the publisher makes your work open at no cost to you or your institution. It may be called Diamond/Platinum/Unicorn OA. Many small and regional society publications use this method. They are typically hosted by universities or other research organizations and use internal resources and grants to fund publication. The majority of gold OA articles are published under this model, but unfortunately, many of the more widely read, high Impact Factor journals are not.

  • Author funded OA – Publishers will often make content free and open for readers, but pass along the costs of publication to authors in the form of Article Processing Charges (APCs). If an author has no grant or department money to cover this charge, they are personally responsible for it. APCs can range anywhere from under $500 to several thousand dollars, for publication in a big-name journal. For example, Springer Nature made headlines when it announced it would set its APC at $11,390 per article, for its flagship publication, Nature, and 32 other journals.

  • Hybrid OA – Certain journals make some of their content free and open while shielding other articles behind paywalls. They often frame this as an "author choice" model, where individual researchers can decide whether to pay APCs to make their article open. Publishers sometimes claim that this is a transitional model, and that hybrid journals are a necessary step on the way to full OA. But universities see this as double-dipping, since we're paying for the closed, subscription content, as well as paying to make the OA articles open. This system also disadvantages the many authors who cannot afford to pay. While having access to some information is better than nothing, this model is a complex one to manage. It is a challenge to librarians and to the public to know what is free and what is not.

For alternatives to Gold OA, please see Self Archiving (Green OA).

Additional Resources for Open Access Publishing