In the previous post in this series, we talked about how journal access is controlled by barriers to reading, barriers to publishing, or barriers to reusing the journal’s contents. We also noted that open-access articles, although sometimes casually understood as “free-to-read” articles, are more properly defined as works with neither barriers to reading nor barriers to reuse or redistribution — a distinction that readers might not always care about, but publishers must.
Let’s look at some ways that different combinations of access barriers show up in common practice, and what factors you’ll want to keep in mind as you choose your own journal’s access model and policies. We’ll begin with a few of the more longstanding models.
Subscription access #
Traditionally, journals have used a simple subscription model: anyone can submit to (and potentially be published in) the journal, but only paying subscribers can read the published articles. This is the typical “closed access” model used by journals. We sometimes refer to it as “traditional access”.
We mentioned in Part I that it’s fairly common to publish closed-access content under an All Rights Reserved license, which limits the extent to which the work can be disseminated by anyone other than the copyright holder. However, this is not truly a requirement of the model: as you might guess, the term “subscription access” refers only to the subscribe-to-read barrier, and is silent as to reuse and redistribution.
Because the model distinguishes between readers who do and don’t subscribe, and because it is possible for a reader to transition from one to the other and back again, reader-access policies for subscription journals require a bit of additional thought from the publisher. What defines a subscriber or nonsubscriber? What exactly may a subscriber or nonsubscriber read? How about former subscribers — do they get any access that nonsubscribers do not? Effectively, to get a subscription journal off on the right foot, you’ll need to consider what your journal’s subscription lifecycle looks like, and what access a reader will have at each stage in that cycle.
Fortunately, the traditional subscription model is well understood by the research community — meaning that once you’ve created your policies, communicating and using them is simple enough. Libraries already have firmly established processes in place for understanding, starting, and managing journal subscriptions. Also, because of the nature of the model, subscription funding tends to be spread out across a large base; so your continued ability to publish likely won’t become overly dependent on any single supporter.
The bottom line: Financial barrier to reading.
Gold OA #
The defining feature of a Gold OA article is simple: a Gold OA article is open access (that is, free to read and free to reuse and redistribute) immediately upon publication. Correspondingly, a Gold OA journal is one in which every article is open access immediately upon publication.
In common understanding, Gold OA is often associated with per-article author charges (APCs) or transformative agreements (that is, author-side funding — especially funding for a single article at a time). Accordingly, many readers assume that all Gold OA journals are APC-funded. But technically speaking, publishers and open-access organizations generally agree that APCs are not a necessary component of Gold OA. A Gold OA journal or article might be funded by any system or source, as long as there is no barrier to reading.
With or without APCs, one advantage of Gold OA is reliability: authors and readers know from the very start that every article published in this journal will be open access. This is particularly attractive to authors at institutions with OA mandates. Additionally, many institutions have funds set aside specifically for faculty publication in OA journals. These funds are sometimes separate from their subscription budgets, which means Gold OA journals don’t necessarily compete with subscription journals over the same pools of money.
On the other hand, some members of the research community are philosophically opposed to APCs, believing them to be worse for the research landscape than subscription fees. The argument is that by establishing a correlation between publication of research and ability to pay, APCs selectively restrict the activity of research itself, resulting in an inequitable playing field that is not well mitigated by offering transformative agreements or waivers.
The bottom line: No barrier to reading, nor to reuse; commonly, but not necessarily, associated with financial barriers to authoring.
Diamond OA #
Diamond OA journals charge no fees at all — neither to authors, nor to readers. Their content is free to read, reuse, and distribute immediately upon publication; they will publish accepted articles without any charges; and (like all open-access journals) they publish under unrestrictive licenses. Really, Diamond OA is a more specific type of Gold OA: a Diamond OA journal has all the necessary characteristics of a Gold OA journal, with the additional stipulation that barriers to authoring are explicitly prohibited.
Rather than charging fees, small-scale Diamond OA journals generally rely on volunteer work and the in-kind support of one or more institutions. Larger journals may receive operational funding from sources like grants, donors, endowments, or the sale of advertisements.
At whatever size, this model largely relies on the goodwill of people and/or institutions. As such, a Diamond OA journal is only as robust as the dedication of its supporters. That doesn’t mean the model is inherently unsustainable, but it does mean that for Diamond OA journals in particular, quality of commitments are at least as important as quantity of funding. It also means that size is not necessarily a predictor of success: some initially ambitious journals dry up along with their volunteer pools, while other tiny “garage band” publications survive, and thrive, for decades.
Like Gold OA, Diamond OA has the advantage of a simple and consistent approach to the accessibility of content. But for Diamond OA to work, a journal must have a solid, dedicated support system that will persist — or even better, grow — for years to come.
The bottom line: No barriers to reading, authoring, or reuse.
These are some of the more straightforward access models out there. Next time, we’ll take a look at a few more complex options, plus some extra choices you can offer your authors and readers.
Header image by iMattSmart, 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.