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What is Open Access?

Discover the basics of the Open Access movement

Open access is a broad, international movement that aims for free, open, and permanent online access to scholarly outputs, such as publications, data, and educational resources. 

A publication or other output is open access if there are no financial, legal, or technical barriers to accessing it – that is, anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, and re-use it, in accordance with its license.  Open access differs from the subscription model, in which scholarly output is available only to those with a subscription (usually via libraries).  

Peter Suber, one of the earliest thought leaders on open access, gave this definition. 

Why publish Open Access?

  • The results of scholarly research can be disseminated more widely and rapidly, to scholars all over the world as well as practitioners, clinicians, policy makers and the general public. 
  • Research published in open access can then have a greater and more immediate impact on research, practice, and policy.
  • There are also benefits for the researcher: open-access publications have greater visibility than subscription-only publications.  

Types of Open Access

There are different ways of publishing open access: 

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  • The Gold route:  publication in fully open access journals. This route may involve a charge. The publication costs, known as ‘article processing charges’ (APCs), are covered by authors or by their institutions, either directly or through centrally funded deals with the publisher. Most research funders support open access and are willing to cover the costs themselves. A list of fully open access journals that are accessible worldwide can be found on the DOAJ website. 
     
    • The Diamond route: this subtype of Gold open access involves no charge to the author. For this reason, the diamond route is often associated with as a more equitable approach to open access, aligning better with the values of the research community. Diamond open access journals are usually funded via library subsidy models, institutions or societies. You can find a list of Diamond journals on the DOAJ website by filtering for 'Journals without APCs'. 
       
  • The Hybrid route: publication via ‘hybrid’ journals. These journals are subscription journals that allow open access publication of individual articles on payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC). Thanks to a series of deals between UNL and several academic publishers, Dutch-affiliated researchers can publish in thousands of hybrid journals without having to cover the APC themselves.
     
  • The Green route: the full text of academic publications, usually an earlier version of the manuscript (preprint), or the version after peer-review (Author Accepted Manuscript/post-print), is deposited in a trusted repository, a publicly accessible database managed by a research organisation. You can find all Dutch institutional repositories via the Netherlands Research Portal on OpenAIRE CONNECT. This portal gives access to all the publications in Dutch repositories. More information about this route here. 

Where to start?