Let us take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity on “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access is made possible by the Internet and copyright-holder consent, and many authors, musicians, filmmakers, and other creators who depend on royalties are understandably unwilling to give their consent. More than 350 years, scholars have written peer-reviewed journal articles for impact, not for money, and are free to consent to open access without losing revenue.
Types of Open Access:
- Green– Self-archiving of your publications in institutional repositories (e.g USM e-repository) or subject repositories (e.g arXiv ) , and generally in the form of pre or post-print.
- Gold– Publishing your articles in fully accessible open access journals. It allows free access to articles immediately upon publication, however the authors may or may not pay an article-processing charge to have their articles published in Gold OA journals.
- Hybrid– It is also known as Paid Open Access, where the publishers offer the author an option to make their individual article freely accessible, but with additional fee.While other articles in the journal remain accessible only through subscription. This is known as double-dipping, making an institution, author, or researcher pay twice to access the work.
There are 3 basic types of document versions that you need to know before you do self-archiving in any repositories:
- Pre-prints– It is your research article before you submit for reviewing by journal reviewers
- Post-prints– It is your research article after reviewing process and corrected, but before it is publish by the publishers
- Publisher’s version– It is your published version of articles according to publishers’ format (usually with the logo of publishers on it)
You can check with Sherpa-Romeo in order to verify copyright policy and archive information so that you know about which version of your article can be self-archiving.
You can also browse and search various authentic open access journals through Directory of Open Access Journal
