How Open Access is provided
Open Access can be provided in two ways. Either a researcher can publish in an Open Access journal, a special kind of journal that does not charge for a subscription yet makes its content freely available online for all to read and use, or a researcher can publish in any journal of choice as usual but deposit a copy of the article in an Open Access repository. This process is now known as ‘self-archiving’.
Open Access journals
A Directory of Open Access Journals is maintained at Lund University Library in Sweden. There are currently nearly 4000 journals listed in the Directory. Some of them charge a ‘front-end’ publication fee which the author’s institution or grant normally pays. The majority do not charge a fee but have some other business model that enables them to run the journal without charging a subscription. The Web of Science lists some 250+ Open Access journals in its service and some of them have very high impact factors indeed. They operate peer review in exactly the same way as other traditional journals and the big Open Access publishers - the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central and Hindawi - all offer waivers if authors cannot pay the publication fee but wish to publish in their journals for the increased visibility that Open Access brings to their work.
Open Access repositories
The alternative way of making work Open Access is for authors to deposit their articles in digital open Access repositories. This process is known as self-archiving. This is the route to Open Access that enables authors whose journals of choice for publication are not open Access, and it is also the route that brings huge benefits for universities and research institutions.
Open Access repositories are either centralised subject-based depots or are broad-based institutional depots for electronic articles. They comply with a set of internationally agreed standards and are therefore interoperable, forming in effect a worldwide database of scholarly research. Google, Google Scholar and other Web search engines index Open Access repositories so any articles in them are assured of the best visibility.
There are around 1300 repositories in the world today and the number has been growing by an average of one per day over the last three years as more and more research-based institutions establish a repository of their own. The statistics on the number of repositories and where they are can be found at the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and a list of repositories can be found and searched by using the facility at the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) site.
It seems likely that every research-based (and probably teaching-based, for repositories are useful for that too) institution will have one within a few years. These institutional collections are useful for research management and institutional marketing purposes as well as for making research output Open Access.
There are around 1300 repositories in the world today and the number has been growing by an average of one per day over the last three years as more and more research-based institutions establish a repository of their own. The statistics on the number of repositories and where they are can be found at the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) and a list of repositories can be found and searched by using the facility at the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) site.
It seems likely that every research-based (and probably teaching-based, for repositories are useful for that too) institution will have one within a few years. These institutional collections are useful for research management and institutional marketing purposes as well as for making research output Open Access.
Further information
Open Access self-archiving: an introduction
