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

Famous quotes containing the words open, access and/or journals:

    Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in the river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
    Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
    All information should be free.
    Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
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    Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)

    Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)