What is the Gold route (Gold OA)?

The Gold route (Gold OA) refers to articles that are freely accessible immediately at the time of publication.

This is possible either through Open Access journals or with the publisher's agreement for books.

• The Directory of OA Journals (DOAJ) lists the various Gold OA journals that meet scholarly publishing standards;
• The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) lists academic books. OpenEdition is another platform for Open Access books, primarily in French. Both are excellent sources for identifying publishers that already publish in Open Access.

Works published in Open Access are often protected by an open Creative Commons licence.

Scientific publishing is not free. The Gold route shifts costs from the reader to the author. Gold OA is therefore an "author-pays" model and often involves the payment of article processing charges (APC) for articles, and book processing charges (BPC) for books. APC and BPC fees for purely Gold OA publications arising from research projects it funds are covered by the SNSF and, according to certain criteria, may be covered by UNIL's Gold Open Access Fund.