Open Scholarship and Open Access

OA publishing works much the same as traditional publishing except that the work is freely available online to the world, instead of available only by paid access/paid subscription.

Facts about OA Publishing:

• Journal articles, book chapters, books, conference papers, dissertations, and more can all be published OA. People often think OA publishing is only about journal articles, but lots of scholarly content can be published OA.

• OA published content can be reused and shared. OA content often uses open licenses like Creative Commons licenses which allow more reuse and sharing. Always check the content license to ensure your use is allowed.

• OA journal articles are peer reviewed. A persistent myth about OA journal articles is that they do not go through peer review or do not go through rigorous peer review. For any journals - OA or not, check the editorial practices to ensure it is a peer reviewed journal.

OA Publishing (Gold/Diamond OA)

There are many different models for publishing an OA journal article, and new models are constantly being developed. Let's look at some typical OA journal publishing models that authors can choose from: 

• Open Access Journals: only publish OA articles. Sometimes these journals charge authors a fee (often called an Article Processing Charge or APC) to publish their article. Journals that charge an APC are called Gold OA Journals. Diamond OA Journals do not charge authors a fee for publishing.
• Hybrid Journals: publish both closed articles (articles behind a paywall) and OA articles. These journals may charge authors a fee (often called an APC) in order to publish their article OA. Often, this model is called Gold OA.
• Read & Publish Agreements: publish articles OA at no cost for authors of a specific institution like CWRU. With this model, the author's institution has an subscription agreement with the publisher to publish works from institutionally affiliated authors at no cost to the author (no APC). Learn more about CWRU OA Agreements with publishers. Also known as Transformational Agreements.
• Subscribe to Open (S2O): a model to convert closed (paywalled) journals to OA journals through subscriptions. Each year if enough libraries subscribe to a specific journal, the journal will publish all articles OA at no cost to authors. If there are not enough subscriptions for that year, the journal will not publish articles OA, and all articles will be paywalled for that year. 

OA Repository Deposit (Green OA or Self Archiving)

Repository deposit refers to posting a version of scholarly content (i.e. articles, chapters and books, data, conference papers, etc.) to an open access repository website. The practice is often referred to as author self archiving or Green Open Access. The work is not published when deposited in a repository and does not go through a review or editorial process but is simply made freely available to the public. There are several types of repositories including: 

• Institutional Repositories: online archives that provide access to scholarly content created by faculty, staff, and students of an institution. These repositories can also host department journals or university research events. At CWRU, we have two institutional repositories: Scholarly Commons @ CWRU and the Law School's Scholarly Commons 
• Data Repositories: provide access to datasets produced by researchers. Researchers share these datasets in order to help other understand their research and to be transparent. At CWRU, we support the Open Science Framework (OSF) data repository. Find more information on the OSF Guide.
• Government Repositories: provide access to scholarly content funded by U.S. federal agencies and are maintained and/or supported by government agencies. Some examples include PubMed Central (NIH), NSF-PAR, DOE OSTI, 
• Subject Repositories: provide access to scholarly content within a specific field or discipline.