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Open Access

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Open Access (OA) is a very broad term and it encompasses a lot of different ways of publishing. It is often used to just mean 'freely available to read', but OA articles are also free to download, reuse and adapt (although depending on the licence, there may be some restrictions. You can find out more about OA in our Open Access Hub.

For now, we'll touch on the main 'routes' to OA:

  • Green Open Access: publishing Green OA means that you can deposit the 'accepted manuscript' version of your work (the version before copyediting and typesetting) in your institutional repository as soon as the version of record is published. You may also deposit the accepted manuscript version in a non-commercial disciplinary repository following a stated embargo period (this will change from publisher to publisher, but for EUP, it's one year). You should always include a link to the published version of your article wherever you deposit the accepted version.
  • Gold Open Access: when people say 'Open Access' they're generally talking about Gold OA. If you're publishing via the Gold OA route, you'll need to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC). This charge covers the overhead costs for publishing your work and (in most cases) allows the publisher to make a profit in order to continue publishing journals. Gold OA articles become freely available to read, download, reuse and adapt as soon as they’re published.
  • Diamond/Platinum Open Access: this route to OA is very similar to Gold OA. The main difference is that there is no APC for you to pay as the author. Journals that are published via Diamond or Platinum OA generally have some external funding – often from a university or society – to cover the publication costs.
  • Subscribe to Open: in this model, institutions subscribe to the journal as normal. But once a certain income threshold is met (i.e. once enough institutions subscribe to the journal), all content published in that year becomes OA. As with Diamond or Platinum OA, there are no APCs for authors to pay and the articles follow the same rules as those published via Gold OA.

Transformative Deals: only a select number of institutions and publishers offer transformative deals. It's worth checking whether your institution has any of these types of arrangements with any publishers before submitting your manuscript. With these deals, sometimes called 'read and publish deals', institutions pay to gain access to a publisher's content and allow their researchers to publish OA with that publisher. There may be certain caps or restrictions included in these deals and they will vary from publisher to publisher and institution to institution.

Where to now?

Open Access | Edinburgh University Press