One of the biggest decisions you’ll make about your journal will be its access model. This is what determines who is able to interact with your journal’s published contents, and what they’re allowed to do with it.
When it’s time for you to decide what’s right for your journal, you’ll find it helpful to understand some core concepts.
Defining “access” #
We like to think of “access” as the presence or absence of three types of barriers:
- barriers to reading;
- barriers to authoring; and
- barriers to reuse and redistribution.
Barriers to reading #
Is it necessary for a reader to pay in order to read your content?
This is the first question readers ask when determining whether a work is “open access” or not; for some readers, it’s the only question. If a published work may be freely read by anyone, it’s possible it was published open access. If it requires a payment to the publisher before it can be read, it cannot have been.
For scholarly journals, such payments are most often collected from organizations like university libraries or research institutes, rather than from individual readers. But it’s also common for publishers to set a per-article charge as well. This makes it easy for authors not affiliated with paying libraries to quickly read selected papers if needed. By levying such charges, publishers aim to generate revenue for the journal, either for the purpose of profit, or simply to fund the journal’s operation.
Barriers to authoring #
Is it necessary for an author to pay in order to be published in your journal?
If not, then in the context of access, we can say it has no barriers to authoring. Otherwise, a journal may charge a fee, usually known as an article processing charge (APC), to an accepted author or their supporting institution, before the accepted work is actually published.
Often, a journal will provide one or more mechanisms by which an individual author can get around such fees. For example, authors may have the option of requesting a waiver by means of a standard form. Or, a journal may have entered a transformative agreement with a research institution, wherein the institution pays an up-front bundled price; this price — negotiated separately for each agreement — aims to cover the APCs likely to be incurred by the institution’s affiliated faculty during the agreement term.
In access models that use APCs, the core intention is typically to remove barriers to reading, without losing revenue. The financial burden is instead shouldered by authors and their institutions.
Barriers to reuse and redistribution #
Once a work has been made available by the publisher, what can others do with it?
Can they save it? Make additional copies? Share it? Resell it? And so on. The copyright holder — usually you (the publisher), your contributing authors, your authors’ employers, or some combination thereof — have the power to determine this, simply by declaring the license terms with the publication.
If a work’s license allows it to be freely reused, the work may have been published open access. Conversely, a work published under a license that does not permit free reuse is not strictly considered to be open access, even if it may be freely read.
Open-access proponents (such as the Directory of Open Access Journals) specifically encourage the use of Creative Commons licenses. There are several options to choose from, all of which permit a reasonable amount of reuse. For open-access academic research, the most popular option is the CC BY (or “Creative Commons attribution”) license. Users of a work published under this license may “distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format” — for any purpose, including commercial purposes — “so long as attribution is given to the creator”.
For works that are not open access, it’s more common to publish under an All Rights Reserved license. This means that before using, modifying, or sharing a work in any way, users are expected to ask the copyright holder for permission; the copyright holder may grant the request, refuse it, or even charge a fee in exchange.
It should be noted that such fees are not typically treated as a significant revenue source (unlike the fees generated from barriers to reading or authoring). In fact, many publishers using an All Rights Reserved license will simply grant most reuse or republication requests without charge whenever asked, as a matter of policy. All Rights Reserved doesn’t necessarily mean “everything is forbidden”, nor does it necessarily mean “pay to use” — it means “you need to ask first”. But even so, it’s still a barrier, and it’s important to understand the impact of putting it in place.
Defining “open access” #
Now that we’ve outlined this framework, we can begin to dig into how these principles work in practice. We’ll start with the obvious question: how, together, do these barriers relate to open-access content?
Quite simply, a published work is considered to be open access if:
- it has no barriers to reading; and
- it has no barriers to reuse or redistribution.
Colloquially, many people may call a work “open access” even if it only satisfies the first condition. But in strict terms, an open-access work must satisfy both.
As we noted above, the alternative to a free-reuse, free-republication license (like a Creative Commons license) is one which requires those who wish to use, modify, or share the work to ask the copyright holder for permission. A work published under such a license, being as it remains subject to the whims of its licensor, can hardly be truly considered “open”.
Additionally, although we’ve noted that many publishers will gladly grant such permission when asked, there is also a worst-case scenario: a publisher of an All Rights Reserved work could at any time instate paywalls and legally compel those who had previously shared the work to remove their copies from circulation. This is clearly inconsistent with open access — not only in principle, but also as a practical matter.
Free access to reading is important, but proper licensing is what ensures that a freely available work stays freely available. Many readers may not understand this (and may never really need to), but as a publisher, it’s important that you do.
You may have noticed that we’ve switched to talking about works here, and not journals. A journal, of course, is unambiguously open access if its entire contents are open access. If some articles are open, and others aren’t…well, its classification becomes less clear. But we’ll get to that in a future post.
Lastly, we should point out that barriers to authoring have no bearing on whether a publication is considered “open access” or not. Rather, the presence or absence of APCs starts coming into play as we look at the more specific access-model options — which is what we’ll begin to do next time in this series.
Header image by Henrik Bortels, available from Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash license.
“Dangerous bend” image by Donald Knuth, available from Wikipedia. Free to use under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.