Gold Open Access

What is Gold Open Access?

The Gold Road refers to the immediate Open Access publication.

This is possible either through purely Open Access journals, or by agreement with the publisher for books.

  • The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ ) is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
  • The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB ) lists academic, peer reviewed Open Access books. OpenEdition  is another Open Access Book platform mainly for books in French. Both are excellent sources to get to know the publishers who already publish books in Open Access.

Open Access works published via the Gold road are usually protected by an open licence, such as Creative Commons .

Academic publishing is not free. Gold Open Access shifts the financial flow towards the editor from the reader to the author. Therefore, Gold Open Access is an "author pays" mode and often (although not always!) implies paying article processing charges (APC) or book processing charges (BPC). APC and BPC of purely Gold Open Access is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

 

 

There are no good Open Access journals in my domain. How could I possibly comply with Open Access mandates?

If you have checked the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ and haven't found any relevant journal for the results you would like to publish, you can follow the Green Road to OA.

The Green Road refers to the parallel publication of a version of the manuscript in an open repository, or self-archiving. Open repositories can be institutional, as our own SERVAL, or disciplinary. The publication is often delayed (embargo period) and allowed only for the author accepted manuscript (AAM), also known as postprint. This is the manuscript accepted for publication (post peer-reviewed), but before all copyediting by the editor. There are no costs for researchers to follow this road.

Below you can find a scheme that shows the available roads to Open Access.

OA EN-resize600x451.png

Do all Open Access journals charge Article Processing Charges (APC)?

No.

Many OA journals do not charge Article Processing Charges (APC). In fact, 74% of the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ , do not charge APCs.

Publishing is not free. Gold OA journals that don't charge APCs rely on funding from universities, academies, funding agencies, libraries, etc, to function. These are subsidised OA journals and constitute the Platinum OA model in which articles are free to publish and free to read.