Open Access has many definitions. There are many different stakeholders in scholarly publishing and they all tend to define Open Access slightly differently, may it be for economic or practical reasons. While this is quite unfortunate and most of all confusing, there is one definition that is regarded as key. Its premise is that all publications are available online for everyone for free. The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines it as:

‘By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.’

Note that this definition does not involve any reasoning on charges for authors, which means that Open Access isn’t about an author-pays-model, but about creating equal opportunities in terms of accessibility.

When we recall the definition from question one we can rest assured that there is no barrier to where Open Access can potentially work. Indeed, there are successful Open Access models in every discipline as well as for various types of output or institutional level. The crucial element is to scale those models, which seems to be easier for journals than for monographs.

As there are more monographs in the humanities and social sciences, it appears that the hard sciences are more in favour of Open Access. Yet, this is more a transitional effect. There are proponents as well as opponents of Open Access in all disciplines. Due to such important issues like equal access to knowledge or a more independent communication environment, the support for Open Access initiatives is growing everywhere.

The colour references often stir confusion, also because they are at times substituted by names such as author-pays-model (Gold) or self-archiving (Green).

In essence, though, Open Access should always aim to foster more accessible scholarly communication to make knowledge production more equal. This means that when an excessive price tag for reading an article is simply replaced by an excessive price tag to publish an article, reading scholarly publications is made more accessible by making it less affordable to participate in the communication. This does not make knowledge production more equal – so think twice when you’re about to publish hybrid!

Open Access has no impact on the quality of the published material. And that’s all there is about this.

Publishers of Open Access publications have the same quality systems in place as for closed access publications. Peer review does not vary with the access model and all discussions and variations of post- or open peer review procedures are independent of Open Access to publications.

However, Open Access opponents tend to use Open Access as the ground on which predatory publishing thrives, but this is not true. Indeed, predatory publishing often makes use of a Gold Open Access model, but that doesn’t suffice to equalise Open Access and predatory publishing. The latter is due to uninformed publication choices, the pressures of the publish or perish mentality, and greedy fake publishers. The Open Access community puts hard work into preventing such behaviour. If you’re in doubt, consult, for instance, tools such as SHERPA or the Directory of Open Access Journals, or simply get in touch with a librarian!

High Article or Book Processing Charges prevent Open Access from making scholarly communication more equal. Surely, publishing can hardly be for free, but excessive APCs (ranging from $3,000 to 5,000) and BPCs ($10,000 to 17,000) aren’t sustainable for researchers or universities either.

If the traditional publishing model requires to charge such high fees, it’s the publishing model that has to change. This is not to harm publishers, but to make scholarly communication more accessible and affordable. Open Access wasn’t initiated to bear high profit margins!

Explore more: DOAJ and DOAB. You can even download the metadata and analyse the content in detail, or implement a DOAB search box on your personal site.

Embargo periods can be seen as part of a transitional period from closed access to more broadly adopted Open Access. They are implemented to prevent immediate cannibalisation effects, for instance, that libraries don’t cancel subscriptions when a journal is flipped to Open Access or allows Green Open Access.

That this is only reasonable from a legacy publishing perspective is supported by the fact that cannibalisation effects are small. Institutional purchase decisions are more complex than they appear to be with the reasoning of embargo periods. For researchers, it’s important to bear in mind that embargo periods should not prevent them from trying to self-archive their research as often as possible.

It’s worth knowing the differences. But if you are a researcher, more important is that you know about where your touch points with the different concepts are, or what the risks or benefits are. Scholarly communication can only be made more equal and affordable when all people involved know how they can contribute to it.

To find out more, visit your university’s FAQ site such as this or get in touch with your librarian.

Publishing indeed requires a reasonable compensation. As stated before, scholarly communication has its price. Yet, the question is always, how much can it cost, what is being covered by the costs, and who is required to pay. Editorial work and production technology are reasonable; maintaining a high profit margin or subsidising a legacy publishing model built on Journal Impact Factor promotion is not.

There are many studies available on what is reasonable and how the prices vary. When you face a publishing decision for yourself or your team, compare prices or get in touch with your librarian (yes, librarians are a great resource beyond filtering content for you!).

Yes, there seems to be a citation advantage for Open Access publications (for instance, have a look here or take UCL Press – they publish only Open Access titles (about 80 so far) and achieved stunning 1m+ downloads, resulting in more than 12,500 downloads on average per title).

But remember that through Open Access you can contribute to a larger goal. Access to knowledge should not depend on resources or funds, and you can make it work. That you get more visibility is a nice bonus, isn’t it?