One of the most common ways to disseminate research results is by writing a manuscript and publishing it in a journal, conference proceedings or a book. For many years those publications were made available to the public under a payment by means of a subscription fee or individually. However, at the turn of the 21st century a new movement appeared with a clear objective: make all the research results available to the public without any restrictions.This movement took the name of Open Access and established two initial strategies to achieve its final goal. The first strategy was to provide tools and assistance to scholars to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic repositories. The second one was to launch a new generation of journals using copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish.
Open Access to publications means that research publications like articles and books can be accessed online, free of charge by any user, with no technical obstacles (such as mandatory registration or login to specific platforms). At the very least, such publications can be read online, downloaded and printed. Ideally, additional rights such as the right to copy, distribute, search, link, crawl and mine should also be provided. Open Access can be realised through two main non-exclusive routes:
Find out more about Open Access to publications on our Open Access guide. You will also find more information about our Open Access Publications Fund (OAPF) that support APCs at the UFS.
With more than 4500 repositories available for researchers to self-archive their publications, according to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), you will find institutional repositories, subject based or thematic repositories and harvesters listed. Institutional repositories such as our own KovsieScholar are generally managed by research institutions to provide to their community a place to archive and share openly papers and other research outputs. Subject based repositories are usually managed by research communities and most of the contents are related to a certain discipline. Finally, harvesters aggregate content from different repositories becoming sites to perform general searches and build other value-added services.
Repositories have always been seen as an alternative way to access scientific publications when accessing. to the original source is not affordable. There are tools like the Unpaywall browser extension that facilitates this alternative.
When choosing a journal to publish research results, researchers should take a moment to read the journal policy regarding the transfer of copyright. Many journals still require for publication that authors transfer full copyright. This transfer of rights implies that authors must ask for permission to reuse their own work beyond what is allowed by the applicable law and unless there are some uses already granted. Among those granted uses you will find teaching purposes, sharing with colleagues, and especially how researchers can self-archive their papers in repositories. When looking at the self archiving conditions you must identify two key issues: the version of the paper that can be deposited and when it can be publicly available. Use a tool like SHERPA/RoMEO to help you identify these policies.
If I publish my work as a preprint, it won't be acknowledged - I will only receive credit for a peer-reviewed journal article.
Many funders are acknowledging the growing presence of preprint publishing in their policies. In addition, preprints help to establish priority of results and may increase the impact - and citation count - of a later peer-reviewed article.
Avoid the misconception of understanding an open-access journal as a journal where authors must pay to publish. The author-pay model is just one of the existing business models for open-access journals.