Open Access or more specifically Open Access to Publications. It operates on the basis that scholarship should be shared with everyone and not hidden behind paywalls.
- Open Access (OA) is about free, immediate, online access to research articles with full re-use rights. It is a disruption to traditional publishing models and concerned with equity, value, and impact.
- TU Dublin has an Open Access to Publications Policy.
Traditionally an author submits an article to a subscription journal and waits to be accepted. This version of the article is known as the Pre-Print. If considered suitable for possible publication, the article goes through the peer review process. In most cases the author will be asked to make certain changes. Once the changes are made this version is now what is called the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (ACM). The journal will then go on to publish the article. There may be a big delay between an article being accepted and being published as the volume of scholarships increases throughout the world. The ACM version of the article is the one the author should keep and upload to the institutional repository (this is known as green open access).
This is a flowchart of the publishing process.
As you can see the stages are:
- Pre-Print this is the version that is submitted to the journal.
- The article goes through the peer review process, the changes are made by the authors, this is now the author’s final manuscript known as the Post Print.
By uploading the Author’s accepted manuscript into the institutional repository a version of the article is made available much earlier in the process and can start accruing citations and creating impact.
Key Benefits:
- Researchers and their institutions benefit from having the widest possible audience.
Researchers provide their articles to publishers for free, because their compensation comes in the form of recognition for their findings. Open Access means more readers, more potential collaborators, more citations for their work, and more recognition for them and their institution. Open Access means improved access to research for all. - Research benefits when the latest techniques can be easily used.
For years, we have had powerful text and data mining tools that can analyse the entire research literature, uncovering trends and connections that no human reader could. While publishers’ technical and legal barriers currently prevent their widespread use, Open Access empowers anyone to use these tools, which hold the potential to revolutionize how research is conducted. - Open Access expands the number of potential contributors to research from just those at institutions wealthy enough to afford journal subscriptions to anyone with an internet connection.
- Funders invest in research to advance human knowledge and improve lives. Open Access increases the return on that investment by ensuring the results of the research they fund can be read and built on and used by anyone, including Industry and Society.
- Even the best ideas remain just that until they are shared, until they can be utilised by others. The more people that can access and build upon the latest research, the more valuable that research becomes and the more likely we are to benefit as a society.
There are several colours of OA:
| Diamond/ Platinum | Immediate Open Access publication by the journal or book publisher without payment of a fee. Copyright may be retained by the author and permission barriers to share, or reuse are removed (generally a CC BY license) |
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| Gold | Immediate Open Access publication by the journal or book publisher. In some cases, a fee is charged. Copyright may be retained by the author and permission barriers to share, or reuse is generally removed. |
| Bronze | The content is free to read and/or download on the publisher’s website, but it is not published under an open license that permits sharing or reuse. The publisher can withdraw access at any time. This form of so-called ‘Open’ Access is often used to make content free to read for only a brief period, perhaps immediately after publication or in response to a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since there is no open license, it is not, in fact, Open Access at all. |
| Green | A version of the publication (usually the Author’s Accepted Manuscript) is archived online, e.g., in a repository. It does not include any of the work typically carried out by the publisher, such as e.g., copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, indexing, metadata tagging, marketing, or distribution. |
| Black | A publication that is not openly licensed, or for which reuse rights have not been granted, which is shared online illegally (e.g., via Sci-Hub) |
| Hybrid | 'Hybrid' is usually applied to journals. A hybrid journal is a subscription journal in which some articles are made Open Access on payment of a fee. This model has attracted particular criticism for its expense and its vulnerability to abuses such as 'double-dipping'. Some book publishers offer chapter-level Open Access, particularly for collected and edited volumes. These are sometimes referred to as ‘hybrid books.’ |
You have requirements through TU Dublin Open Access Policy to archive in Arrow which satisfies Green Open Access. You may be required to have an embargo on your work. Always double-check.
Make sure to check the publisher policy on OA at SherpaRomeo (most publishers will have a section on their website with their policy as well).
Sherpa Romeo is an online service that aggregates and presents publisher and journal open access policies from around the world. It is a quick and easy way to find out if the journal that you are thinking of publishing in has an open access policy that at the very least will allow you to upload your final author’s version (after all changes have been made) to the institutional repository. You can check by the title of the journal or by the publisher.
If you do not find the journal on Sherpa RoMeo check the publisher’s website to find information about their open access policy.
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