Open Access Publishing

What is Open Access

“By 'open access' to the literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

What is meant by Open Access publishing?

Open access is a publishing model for scholarly communication that makes research information available to readers at no cost, as opposed to the traditional subscription model in which readers have access to scholarly information by paying a subscription (usually via libraries). Source: Dutch National

Routes of Open Access Publishing

The Gold Route

Full Open Access journals: publication via publisher platforms, in full open access journals. This route may involve a charge. The publication costs, known as ‘article processing charges’ (APCs), are covered by authors or by their institutions. Most research funders support open access and are willing to cover the costs themselves. A list of fully open access journals that are accessible worldwide can be found on the DOAJ website. Source: Dutch National

Hybrid Journals: publication via ‘hybrid’ journals. These journals are subscription journals that allow open access publication of individual articles on payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC). Thanks to a series of deals between the VSNU and several academic publishers, Dutch-affiliated researchers can publishing for free in thousands of hybrid journals. Source: Dutch National

Open Access Data Repositories

Open data repositories are where researchers place/archive/deposit (and discover) datasets from original research. There are repositories designed around specific disciplines and around specific data types 

Open Access eBooks

Open access (OA) refers to digital content that is available free of charge for everyone. Originally associated only with scholarly journals that published free online, the concept has been extended to other types of content such as eBooks and media. Source: COM Library

The Green Route

The green route: the full text of academic publications is deposited in a trusted repository, a publicly accessible database managed by a research organisation. You can find all Dutch institutional repositories via NARCIS, the Dutch portal for research information. NARCIS gives access to all the publications in Dutch repositories. Source: Dutch National

Researchers are encouraged to publish research articles with preferred publishers. In addition to publishing their research articles, they are encouraged to also upload a second copy of the published article into the institutions’ institutional repository. The purpose of an IR is to centrally archive all research output by an institution, at the same time increasing the visibility of the institution and the impact it has in addressing research challenges. 

Rhodes University has invested in various platforms to archive institutionally generated research in a central Rhodes Digital Commons: