This is the first in a series of posts in which we go into more detail about some of the concepts that F1000Research is based on. In this first instalment, we look at open access. What is open access exactly? And what are some common misconceptions about open access?

A short history of open access

Open access as we know it was defined in a meeting in Budapest in 2001. This meeting produced the Budapest Open Access Initiative: a statement of principles about open access publishing.

The resulting document, published in 2002, described the opportunities that the internet could provide in opening up scientific literature: “…lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” Despite this occasional lofty wording, the document is very clear on the definition of open access:

“By “open access” to this 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 only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

At this point there were not yet many open access publishers, although researchers could make their manuscripts available by self-archiving. Within the life sciences, BioMed Central was the first open access publisher to launch in 2000. (It was founded by Vitek Tracz, who more recently founded F1000Research.) The Public Library of Science announced their intent to publish shortly after, in 2001.

Open access today

Since these early open access publishers, many others have followed suit, and open access is more popular than ever. In August 2013, the European Commission announced that “open access is reaching the tipping point, with around 50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for free.” The European Union’s research framework Horizon 2020 requires all research they fund to be made available via open access. Similar requirements are made by large funding agencies around the world, such as the Wellcome Trust in the UK and the National Institutes of Health in the USA.

Green and Gold open access

But how can researchers comply with these funder regulations? There are currently two possible open access routes: Green and Gold.

Green Open Access is archiving of accepted manuscripts in accessible repositories, for example in their institutional repository or in PubMed Central. While this allows researchers to publish in any journal they want and deposit later, the system has some limitations: Some journals only allow the archiving of a final accepted manuscript, not of the published and formatted paper. Some journals open up access to all their archived articles after a certain time period, but in other cases authors will have to remember to deposit their own paper, which can be a time consuming process.

Gold Open Access is publisher-mediated open access. The benefit of this is that the article is immediately made open access, and authors don’t have to take any extra steps, but there can be a cost associated with it. Usually the entire journal will be available as an open access journal, but some journals operate a hybrid model, where researchers can pay to publish an open access article in an otherwise non-open-access journal.

Three misconceptions about open access

As the above summary illustrates, open access has a distinct definition, but can be applied in different ways. That can lead to some confusion, and there are a few misconceptions about open access floating around, such as the following.

1. Open access just means “free to read”

Not exactly. Although the basic idea of open access is indeed to give everyone access to the contents of a research paper, the term “open access” implies more than just making the content free. It also requires making the material available for others to re-use, and allowing content mining (e.g. for meta-analysis).

Usually, open access articles are accompanied by a Creative Commons licence that describes the details of what can be done with the content of the paper. Most of these licences require giving credit to the authors, who generally retain copyright. (See more about Creative Commons licences in the “further reading” section below).

2. Gold Open Access means “author pays”

No, it just means that it’s publisher-mediated open access. Because the publisher does not rely on subscription fees from readers and libraries for those articles, they cover their costs in other ways. Some smaller journals can be funded entirely by institutes or societies. Larger open access publishers often use article processing charges (APCs), which allow them to scale their business model once they start receiving more submissions. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists which model each journal uses.

Although APCs are applied on a per-article basis, in reality many authors do not pay these fees out of pocket. Funders and institutes who require open access publication often support authors and cover the cost, and many publishers will waive APCs for low income countries via the HINARI programme or on a case-by-case basis for specific situations of economic difficulty.

3. Open access implies bad quality

No. Whether an article is free to access or hiding behind a paywall says nothing about the quality of the research itself or about the peer review carried out on the paper.

This misconception comes from the fact that there is indeed a small group of so-called “predatory” publishers who are charging researchers to publish articles in their journals for the sole purpose of making money, without considering the scientific quality and often without even inviting peer reviewers to look at the papers. On the surface, this charge for publication may resemble the APC model used by many open access journals, but it is different. Reliable journals use APCs to cover the cost of managing the editorial and peer review process, and to develop new features to support their authors and readers, whereas “predatory” journals don’t invest in these processes.

But how can you distinguish a good journal from a bad one? First of all, you can check if you know people who have published in this journal, or members of the editorial board. Has the journal attended or sponsored conferences or supported other initiatives? Is the journal a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)? Is the journal included in scholarly databases such as PubMed? So far, that all applies equally to both open access and subscription journals. For open access journals, there is even an extra level of scrutiny: The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) regularly re-reviews its members, and publishers must comply to very strict guidelines to remain a member, so you can check their member list. The DOAJ has also recently tightened their criteria for inclusion, and has removed several journals that do not fit these criteria. Their member list is easy to search, and provides detailed information about each publication.

Finally, if a journal has a transparent peer review model, where names of reviewers and/or content of referee reports or editorial decision letters are made public, you can see for yourself what the peer review process looks like and make an informed decision about the journal.

References:

European Commission press release about open access: Open access to research publications reaching ‘tipping point’ (21 August 2013)

Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 14, 2002).

Wellcome Trust open access policy

NIH public access policy

New DOAJ criteria: Press release (March 19, 2014) The new application form for journals’ inclusion in DOAJ has been released.

DOAJ removed members after they showed to not carry out proper editorial practices (copy of entry on no longer available DOAJ news site)

OASPA re-reviews members. “OASPA’s second statement following the article in Science entitled “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?””

Library image from KTH Biblioteket via Flickr.

Further reading:

More about different types of Creative Commons licences for open access publishing:

Interview with Vitek Tracz in Science.The seer of science publishing. Interview by Tania Rabesandratana, 4 October 2013, Science 342 (6154) , 66-67

The state of open access. Series of interviews by Richard Poynder with people involved in open access publishing.

Open Access: Yes you can. Stephen Curry shows how easy it is to publish open access.