Open Access Journals

Open Access Journals

Open-access journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. Subsidized journals are financed by an academic institution, learned society or a government information center; those requiring payment are typically financed by money made available to researchers for the purpose from a public or private funding agency, as part of a research grant. There have also been several modifications of open-access journals that have considerably different natures: hybrid open-access journals and delayed open-access journals.

Open-access journals (sometimes called the "gold road to open access") are one of the two general methods for providing open access. The other one (sometimes called the "green road") is self-archiving in a repository. The publisher of an open-access journal is known as an "open-access publisher", and the process, "open-access publishing".

In successively looser senses, open-access journals may be considered as:

  • Journals entirely open access
  • Journals with research articles open access (hybrid open-access journals)
  • Journals with some research articles open access (hybrid open-access journals)
  • Journals with some articles open access and the other delayed access
  • Journals with delayed open access (delayed open-access journals)
  • Journals permitting self-archiving of articles


Read more about Open Access Journals:  Debate, History

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