There are three basic types of open journals from which an author can choose.
Forms of publication in OA journals
Pure unpaid open journals
- Diamond (Platinum) Open Access
- The full content of the journal is openly available, the publisher (e.g. university press, scientific community) covers the costs of publishing
Paid open access journals
- Gold Open Access
- The full content of the journal is open access.
- Costs associated with publishing the article are covered by the author – they pay the publication fee (APC).
- Publication fees are generally an allowable cost in research projects
Hybrid journals
- The journal is open access to subscribers by default, only selected articles where the author pays a publication fee are open access.
- The author often retains the copyright/copyright and there is no time embargo on publication of the article in the repository.
- These journals may contain both open access articles and articles available only on payment basis (journal subscription or payment per article).
- Disadvantages:
- Higher cost and double payment – the institution pays for the journal as part of the subscription and also pays individual authors APCs to publish OA articles.
- This model is not well supported.
Journals available for free after embargo (time delay) expires are not considered open access – they do not meet the immediate access requirement.
Users can use the directory DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) to find a suitable open access journal to publish their article or to search the subject literature.
Predatory journals
Dishonest publishers and magazines, collectively known as predators, have begun to parasitise the idea of paid open journals. Fraudulent/pseudoscience journals or entire collections of journals from one publisher are set up primarily to collect fees. They publish content that has not undergone a standard peer review process and is therefore not verified and trustworthy. More information about predators is available in the chapter Control of predatory (in case of Gold OA).
Find an Open Access journal:
- Open Access journals at CTU
- Open access publishers: PLOS, MDPI, Hindawi, PeerJ, ORE.
- Open Access journals from commercial publishers: Springer Open, Elsevier, APS, IOP, AIP.
- DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).
- Browse, search, and explore journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases.
- Watch out for predatory journals!