An open-access monograph ( open-access book or OA book ) is a scholarly publication usually made openly available online with an open license . These books are freely accessible to the public, typically via the internet. They are part of the open access movement .
66-396: Open access is when academic research is made freely available online for anyone to read and re-use. As with open access journals , there are different business models for funding open-access books, including publication charges , institutional support, library publishing , and consortium models. Some publishers, like OECD Publishing , uses a freemium model where the ebook version
132-410: A professional in the field, a researcher in another field, a journalist , a politician or civil servant , or an interested layperson. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available. Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has
198-478: A bundle of several journals at a discounted price is known as a "big deal". In a big deal a library or consortium of libraries typically pays several million dollars per year to subscribe to hundreds or thousands of toll access journals. By offering such discounted bundled subscriptions, the largest journal publishers were able to squeeze out of the market smaller (often, non-profit and less expensive) publishers, who did not have many journal titles and could not offer
264-416: A case of academic misconduct and plagiarism, and could be pursued as such. There is no evidence that "scooping" of research via preprints exists, not even in communities that have broadly adopted the use of the arXiv server for sharing preprints since 1991. If the unlikely case of scooping emerges as the growth of the preprint system continues, it can be dealt with as academic malpractice. ASAPbio includes
330-489: A colour system. The most commonly recognised names are "green", "gold", and "hybrid" open access; however, several other models and alternative terms are also used. In the gold OA model, the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal's website. In such publications, articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via Creative Commons licenses or similar. Many gold OA publishers charge an article processing charge (APC), which
396-553: A discounted bundle subscription. In the 2010s, efforts increased to "unwrap" or "unbundle" the subscription, if not to cancel them altogether. Services emerged for libraries to share information and reduce the information asymmetry in negotiations with the publishers, like the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) cancellation tracking and the Unsub data analysis tool. Developed in part as
462-403: A free market, such a high profit margin should have attracted numerous competing publishers. However, in a traditional publishing market, each research article is unique, and the consumer (reader or subscriber) cannot substitute one article (or journal) for another. Instead, the competition occurs on the authors' side: authors have a choice, of where to publish. In an open access publishing model,
528-589: A journal's impact factor. Some publishers (e.g. eLife and Ubiquity Press ) have released estimates of their direct and indirect costs that set their APCs. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is " double dipping ", where both authors and subscribers are charged. By comparison, journal subscriptions equate to $ 3,500–$ 4,000 per article published by an institution, but are highly variable by publisher (and some charge page fees separately). This has led to
594-410: A journal, the archived version is called a " postprint ". This can be the accepted manuscript as returned by the journal to the author after successful peer review. Hybrid open-access journals contain a mixture of open access articles and closed access articles. A publisher following this model is partially funded by subscriptions, and only provide open access for those individual articles for which
660-562: A key principle. Open access (mostly green and gratis) began to be sought and provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility itself was opened by the advent of Internet and the World Wide Web . The momentum was further increased by a growing movement for academic journal publishing reform, and with it gold and libre OA. The premises behind open access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review standards of quality while also making
726-550: A majority of authors agree that all future scholarly books should be made available via open access. A 2023 study found that, out of 396,995 open access books analyzed, only 19% were archived, raising concerns about the longevity and accessibility of many OA books distributed online. Open access Open access ( OA ) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to
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#1732776455378792-527: A multitude of journal and conference styles, and sometimes spend months waiting for peer review results. The drawn-out and often contentious societal and technological transition to Open Access and Open Science/Open Research, particularly across North America and Europe (Latin America has already widely adopted "Acceso Abierto" since before 2000 ) has led to increasingly entrenched positions and much debate. The area of (open) scholarly practices increasingly sees
858-461: A new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many publishers that started up as open access-only publishers, such as PLOS, Hindawi Publishing Corporation , Frontiers in... journals, MDPI and BioMed Central. Some open access journals (under the gold, and hybrid models) generate revenue by charging publication fees in order to make
924-468: A role for policy-makers and research funders giving focus to issues such as career incentives, research evaluation and business models for publicly funded research. Plan S and AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America) caused a wave of debate in scholarly communication in 2019 and 2020. Subscription-based publishing typically requires transfer of copyright from authors to the publisher so that
990-583: A series of hypothetical scooping scenarios as part of its preprint FAQ, finding that the overall benefits of using preprints vastly outweigh any potential issues around scooping. Indeed, the benefits of preprints, especially for early-career researchers, seem to outweigh any perceived risk: rapid sharing of academic research, open access without author-facing charges, establishing priority of discoveries, receiving wider feedback in parallel with or before peer review, and facilitating wider collaborations. The "green" route to OA refers to author self-archiving, in which
1056-499: A time-stamp at the time of publication, which helps to establish the "priority of discovery" for scientific claims (Vale and Hyman 2016). This means that a preprint can act as proof of provenance for research ideas, data, code, models, and results. The fact that the majority of preprints come with a form of permanent identifier, usually a digital object identifier (DOI), also makes them easy to cite and track. Thus, if one were to be "scooped" without adequate acknowledgement, this would be
1122-627: A version of the article (often the peer-reviewed version before editorial typesetting, called "postprint") is posted online to an institutional and/or subject repository. This route is often dependent on journal or publisher policies, which can be more restrictive and complicated than respective "gold" policies regarding deposit location, license, and embargo requirements. Some publishers require an embargo period before deposition in public repositories, arguing that immediate self-archiving risks loss of subscription income. Embargoes are imposed by between 20 and 40% of journals, during which time an article
1188-483: A very important role in responding to open-access mandates from funders. Serials crisis#Big deal The term serials crisis describes the problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications , especially scholarly journals , outpacing academic institutions' library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers' needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than inflation for several decades, while
1254-466: A wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs. Diamond OA journals are available for most disciplines, and are usually small (<25 articles per year) and more likely to be multilingual (38%); thousands of such journals exist. The growth of unauthorized digital copying by large-scale copyright infringement has enabled free access to paywalled literature. This has been done via existing social media sites (e.g.
1320-410: Is a prohibition on data mining . For this reason, many big data studies of various technologies performed by economists ( as well as machine learning by computer scientists ) are limited to patent analysis , since the patent documents are not subject to copyright at all. FAIR is an acronym for 'findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable', intended to more clearly define what is meant by
1386-436: Is a unique commodity, that cannot be replaced in an academic library collection by another article. The same uniqueness applies to journals, which are collections of articles. This unique combination of non-replaceable demand and copyright monopoly leads to the type of price inelasticity not found in other fields, and allows each academic publisher to act as a monopolist , despite the presence of numerous other publishers on
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#17327764553781452-443: Is analyzed for more than 18,000 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO Information Services...For 2019, the average rate of increase over two years was 5.5%, up slightly from 5% in 2018." A 2021 study found that the cost of publishing a journal article to publishers varies from $ 200 (in a large-scale platform with a post-publication review) to $ 1,000 (in a prestigious journal with an acceptance rate under 10%), with $ 400 per article being
1518-752: Is consistent with the Green Open Access model. A persistent concern surrounding preprints is that work may be at risk of being plagiarised or "scooped" – meaning that the same or similar research will be published by others without proper attribution to the original source – if publicly available but not yet associated with a stamp of approval from peer reviewers and traditional journals. These concerns are often amplified as competition increases for academic jobs and funding, and perceived to be particularly problematic for early-career researchers and other higher-risk demographics within academia. However, preprints, in fact, protect against scooping. Considering
1584-480: Is in demand elasticity : whereas an English literature curriculum can substitute Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone with a free-domain alternative, such as A Voyage to Lilliput , an emergency room physician treating a patient for a life-threatening urushiol poisoning cannot substitute the most recent, but paywalled review article on this topic with a 90 year-old copyright-expired article that
1650-919: Is incommensurably smaller, than the cost of on-paper publishing and distribution, which is still preferred by many fiction literature readers. Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterised by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on author fees or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers , theses , book chapters, monographs , research reports and images. There are different models of open access publishing and publishers may use one or more of these models. Different open access types are currently commonly described using
1716-1178: Is made available for free, but readers have the option to purchase a print copy. Sales of the print version subsidise the cost of producing the book. There is some evidence that making electronic editions of books open access can increase sales of the print edition. While open access to journal articles has become very common, with 50% of articles published in 2011 available as open access, open access to books has not yet seen as much uptake at this time. However, some dedicated open-access book publishers, such as Open Book Publishers , Punctum Books , and others who publish both books and journals like Open Humanities Press , have been launched. Gradually, academic publishers and university presses have also adopted an open-access monograph approach, offering this publishing option alongside journal articles. Major publishers of open-access books include, for example, Taylor & Francis, MDPI, and MIT Press. The OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) online library and publication platform provides access to thousands of peer-reviewed academic books, mainly in
1782-506: Is much discussion among case librarians and scholars about the crisis and how to address its consequences. Academic and research libraries are resorting to several tactics to contain costs while maintaining as much access to the latest scholarly research for their users as possible. These include increasingly borrowing journals from one another (see interlibrary loan ), purchasing single articles from commercial document suppliers instead of subscribing to whole journals, cancelling subscriptions to
1848-458: Is one of the most permissive, only requiring attribution to be allowed to use the material (and allowing derivations and commercial use). A range of more restrictive Creative Commons licenses are also used. More rarely, some of the smaller academic journals use custom open access licenses. Some publishers (e.g. Elsevier ) use "author nominal copyright" for OA articles, where the author retains copyright in name only and all rights are transferred to
1914-606: Is paywalled before permitting self-archiving (green OA) or releasing a free-to-read version (bronze OA). Embargo periods typically vary from 6–12 months in STEM and >12 months in humanities , arts and social sciences . Embargo-free self-archiving has not been shown to affect subscription revenue , and tends to increase readership and citations. Embargoes have been lifted on particular topics for either limited times or ongoing (e.g. Zika outbreaks or indigenous health ). Plan S includes zero-length embargoes on self-archiving as
1980-600: Is the Subscribe to Open publishing model introduced by Annual Reviews ; if the subscription revenue goal is met, the given journal's volume is published open access. Advantages and disadvantages of open access have generated considerable discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers , editorial staff and society publishers. Reactions of existing publishers to open access journal publishing have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to
2046-424: Is typically paid through institutional or grant funding. The majority of gold open access journals charging APCs follow an "author-pays" model, although this is not an intrinsic property of gold OA. Self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author also posts the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted
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2112-477: Is usually other researchers. Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. All researchers benefit from open access as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the " serials crisis ". Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An open access article can be read by anyone –
2178-415: The #ICanHazPDF hashtag) as well as dedicated sites (e.g. Sci-Hub ). In some ways this is a large-scale technical implementation of pre-existing practice, whereby those with access to paywalled literature would share copies with their contacts. However, the increased ease and scale from 2010 onwards have changed how many people treat subscription publications. Similar to the free content definition,
2244-637: The American Chemical Society (ACS), for example, is based in large parts on publications. In 1999, the income of the ACS was $ 349 million, where $ 250 million came from information services. According to a 2004 House of Commons report (by the Science and Technology Committee), the ACS is one of the driving forces of the STM (science, technology, medicine) serials crisis. According to the same report
2310-681: The Free Journal Network . APC-free journals tend to be smaller and more local-regional in scope. Some also require submitting authors to have a particular institutional affiliation. A " preprint " is typically a version of a research paper that is shared on an online platform prior to, or during, a formal peer review process. Preprint platforms have become popular due to the increasing drive towards open access publishing and can be publisher- or community-led. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist. The posting of pre-prints (and/or authors' manuscript versions)
2376-526: The 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of the work. The main focus of the open access movement has been on " peer reviewed research literature", and more specifically on academic journals . This is because: 1) such publications have been a subject of serials crisis , unlike newspapers , magazines and fiction writing . The main difference between these two groups
2442-551: The American Chemical Society had led to uneven cancellation of titles to make the budget balance. The result is that the little-used Elsevier and ACS titles must remain in the portfolio while the more popular titles by other publishers are cancelled. Every year the Library Journal publishes a summary of periodical pricing and inflation. According to its 2019 price survey, "The rate of price increase
2508-634: The United States Periodical Price Index. As a result of the increasing cost of journals, academic libraries have reduced their expenditures on other types of publications such as scholarly monographs . Currency exchange rates can serve to increase the volatility of subscription prices throughout the world. For example, journal publishers in Europe often set their prices in Euro not United States Dollars , so subscribers in
2574-584: The United States will experience varying prices due to exchange rate fluctuations. The converse is true for European institutions who subscribe to journals published in the United States. As the United States and Europe publish the vast majority of scholarly journals, libraries in other regions are subject to ever greater uncertainty. Although exchange rates can go down as well as up, long-term trends in currency values can lead to chronic price inflation experienced by particular libraries or collections. There
2640-457: The assessment that there is enough money "within the system" to enable full transition to OA. However, there is ongoing discussion about whether the change-over offers an opportunity to become more cost-effective or promotes more equitable participation in publication. Concern has been noted that increasing subscription journal prices will be mirrored by rising APCs, creating a barrier to less financially privileged authors. The inherent bias of
2706-662: The authors (or research sponsor) pay a publication fee. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is " double dipping ", where both authors and subscribers are charged. For these reasons, hybrid open access journals have been called a " Mephistophelian invention", and publishing in hybrid OA journals often do not qualify for funding under open access mandates , as libraries already pay for subscriptions thus have no financial incentive to fund open access articles in such journals. Bronze open access articles are free to read only on
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2772-424: The average cost. Also, when the number of published articles in a journal (such as a mega-journal ) exceeds 1000, the fixed costs become less than 1% of the direct costs, and the marginal cost of publishing more articles is very small. At the same time, the revenue for most subscription journals is about $ 4,000 per article. That study estimated the average profit margin of academic journal publishers at ca. 55%. In
2838-404: The crisis started around 1990 when many universities and libraries complained about the dramatic inflation of STM subscription prices especially for the flagship Journal of the American Chemical Society , which is exclusively sold as a bundle with all other ACS journals. The report further states that: the no–cancellation clauses attached to their multi-year multi-journal deals with Elsevier and
2904-401: The current APC-based OA publishing perpetuates this inequality through the 'Matthew effect' (the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer). The switch from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish has left essentially the same people behind, with some academics not having enough purchasing power (individually or through their institutions) for either option. Some gold OA publishers will waive all or part of
2970-448: The differences between traditional peer-review based publishing models and deposition of an article on a preprint server, "scooping" is less likely for manuscripts first submitted as preprints. In a traditional publishing scenario, the time from manuscript submission to acceptance and to final publication can range from a few weeks to years, and go through several rounds of revision and resubmission before final publication. During this time,
3036-402: The fee for authors from less developed economies . Steps are normally taken to ensure that peer reviewers do not know whether authors have requested, or been granted, fee waivers, or to ensure that every paper is approved by an independent editor with no financial stake in the journal. The main argument against requiring authors to pay a fee, is the risk to the peer review system, diminishing
3102-498: The following changes: An obvious advantage of open access journals is the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library and improved access for the general public; this is especially true in developing countries. Lower costs for research in academia and industry have been claimed in the Budapest Open Access Initiative , although others have argued that OA may raise
3168-420: The funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining subscriptions. The increased prices have also led to the increased popularity of shadow libraries . Each journal article reports unique research findings, and as a result, each article
3234-517: The greatest possible research impact. As a means of achieving this, research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they support. Many of them (including all UK Research Councils) have already adopted open-access mandates , and others are on the way to do so (see ROARMAP ). A growing number of universities are providing institutional repositories in which their researchers can deposit their published articles. Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play
3300-626: The humanities and social sciences. The OAPEN Foundation also provides a directory of open access works via Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). A report released in 2015 by the UK's main funding body for research, the Higher Education Funding Council for England , states the importance of open access monographs: "Monographs are a vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication, and must be sustained in any moves to open access." A 2019 survey has shown that
3366-604: The kinds of open access defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative , the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities . The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses ; all of which require as a minimum attribution of authorship to the original authors. In 2012,
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#17327764553783432-516: The latter can monetise the process via dissemination and reproduction of the work. With OA publishing, typically authors retain copyright to their work, and license its reproduction to the publisher. Retention of copyright by authors can support academic freedoms by enabling greater control of the work (e.g. for image re-use) or licensing agreements (e.g. to allow dissemination by others). The most common licenses used in open access publishing are Creative Commons . The widely used CC BY license
3498-633: The least used or least cost-effective journals, encouraging various methods of obtaining free access to journals, of which black open access provided by Sci-Hub became the most successful, and converting from printed to electronic copies of journals; however, publishers sometimes charge more for the online edition of a journal, and price increases for online journals have followed the same inflationary pattern as have journals in paper format. Many individual libraries have joined co-operative consortia that negotiate license terms for journal subscriptions on behalf of their member institutions. A subscription to
3564-497: The market forces are appropriately balanced. An additional problem is a dramatic increase in the volume of research literature and increasing specialization of that research, i.e. the creation of academic subfields . This includes a growth in the number of scholars and an increase in potential demand for these journals. At the same time, funds available to purchase journals are often decreasing in real terms. Libraries have seen their collection budgets decline in real terms compared to
3630-486: The market. Another possible set of factors in this situation includes the increasing domination of scholarly communication by a small number of commercial publishers , whose journals are far more costly than those of most non-profit academic societies. However, the institutional subscription prices for journals published by some academic society publishers (see below) have also exhibited inflationary patterns similar to those seen among commercial publishers. The earnings of
3696-507: The number of works under libre open access was considered to have been rapidly increasing for a few years, though most open-access mandates did not enforce any copyright license and it was difficult to publish libre gold OA in legacy journals. However, there are no costs nor restrictions for green libre OA as preprints can be freely self-deposited with a free license, and most open-access repositories use Creative Commons licenses to allow reuse. The biggest drawback of many Open Access licenses
3762-1011: The overall quality of scientific journal publishing. No-fee open access journals, also known as "platinum" or "diamond" do not charge either readers or authors. These journals use a variety of business models including subsidies, advertising, membership dues, endowments, or volunteer labour. Subsidising sources range from universities, libraries and museums to foundations, societies or government agencies. Some publishers may cross-subsidise from other publications or auxiliary services and products. For example, most APC-free journals in Latin America are funded by higher education institutions and are not conditional on institutional affiliation for publication. Conversely, Knowledge Unlatched crowdsources funding in order to make monographs available open access. Estimates of prevalence vary, but approximately 10,000 journals without APC are listed in DOAJ and
3828-581: The publisher page, but lack a clearly identifiable license. Such articles are typically not available for reuse. Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements , academic institutions , learned societies , philanthropists or government grants . There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over
3894-462: The publisher. Since open access publication does not charge readers, there are many financial models used to cover costs by other means. Open access can be provided by commercial publishers, who may publish open access as well as subscription-based journals, or dedicated open-access publishers such as Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central . Another source of funding for open access can be institutional subscribers. One example of this
3960-486: The same work will have been extensively discussed with external collaborators, presented at conferences, and been read by editors and reviewers in related areas of research. Yet, there is no official open record of that process (e.g., peer reviewers are normally anonymous, reports remain largely unpublished), and if an identical or very similar paper were to be published while the original was still under review, it would be impossible to establish provenance. Preprints provide
4026-693: The term 'open access' and make the concept easier to discuss. Initially proposed in March 2016, it has subsequently been endorsed by organisations such as the European Commission and the G20 . The emergence of open science or open research has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Scholarly publishing invokes various positions and passions. For example, authors may spend hours struggling with diverse article submission systems, often converting document formatting between
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#17327764553784092-421: The terms 'gratis' and 'libre' were used in the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition to distinguish between free to read versus free to reuse. Gratis open access ( [REDACTED] ) refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, without re-use rights. Libre open access ( [REDACTED] ) also refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, plus some additional re-use rights, covering
4158-482: The total cost of publication, and further increase economic incentives for exploitation in academic publishing. The open access movement is motivated by the problems of social inequality caused by restricting access to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions with the financial means to purchase access to many journals, as well as the economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of academic publishing. The intended audience of research articles
4224-781: The work openly available at the time of publication. The money might come from the author but more often comes from the author's research grant or employer. While the payments are typically incurred per article published (e.g. BMC or PLOS journals), some journals apply them per manuscript submitted (e.g. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics until recently) or per author (e.g. PeerJ ). Charges typically range from $ 1,000–$ 3,000 ($ 5,380 for Nature Communications ) but can be under $ 10, close to $ 5,000 or well over $ 10,000. APCs vary greatly depending on subject and region and are most common in scientific and medical journals (43% and 47% respectively), and lowest in arts and humanities journals (0% and 4% respectively). APCs can also depend on
4290-446: The work, or to an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. Green OA is free of charge for the author. Some publishers (less than 5% and decreasing as of 2014) may charge a fee for an additional service such as a free license on the publisher-authored copyrightable portions of the printed version of an article. If the author posts the near-final version of their work after peer review by
4356-407: Was published before the invention of prednisone in 1954. 2) the authors of research papers are not paid in any way, so they do not suffer any monetary losses, when they switch from behind paywall to open access publishing, especially, if they use diamond open access media. 3) the cost of electronic publishing , which has been the main form of distribution of journal articles since ca. 2000,
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