Tenth Thing: Open Access Publishing

When it comes to Open Access (OA), things are more complex than ever. 

There are different kinds of OA publishing agreements, wildly variable OA publishing fees, and near-constant scandals involving profit-driven publishers’ OA models. The OA repository landscape is complex, too, with different kinds of repositories, publisher embargo requirements, and the emergence of “rights retention” strategies.  Meanwhile, research funders are adopting stricter OA policies. The NHMRC, for example, is Australia’s largest health and medical research funder and in late 2022 announced a new OA policy requiring full and immediate OA to grant-related papers. The University, too, recently released a major update to its Principles for Open Access to Research Outputs at Melbourne. 

This post, written by Dr Zachary Kendal, will help demystify the current OA landscape, pointing to resources that can help you in your OA journey. 

Open Access publishing

Let’s try to simplify today’s OA publishing options… 

Pay-to-Publish Open Access models 

Long-running commercial publishers have mostly been slow to adopt OA. When they have, it’s often been in the form of “hybrid” models. A hybrid journal, for example, is a subscription journal that will publish an individual article OA for a fee – an Article Processing Charge (APC). Hybrid models are also common in academic book publishing, where a Book or Chapter Processing Charge (BPC/CPC) is charged to publish a book, or a chapter, OA. 

Many fully OA journals and book publishers also levy APCs/BPCs for publishing, although these fees may be lowered if other funding sources are secured. APCs are higher, on average, for hybrid journals than OA ones, and we’ve seen some exceptionally high APCs in recent years – it now costs about AU$16,000 to publish an article OA in Nature.

Fee-Free Open Access publishing 

OA publishers can sometimes eliminate author-facing fees if they secure other sources of funding. Almost 70% of the 19,000+ journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals do not levy APCs, being fully funded by institutions, organisations, societies, or grants. Some OA book publishers also operate under fee-free models, including Open Book Publishers and Open Humanities Press. 

An emerging model for fee-free OA publishing is Subscribe to Open (S2O), where a journal commits to making future content OA at no cost to authors if annual subscription targets are reached. In the book publishing space, MIT Press’s Direct to Open program is an S2O-style model that enables OA publishing for monographs and edited volumes.  

Open Access publishing agreements 

It might be possible to avoid a journal’s APCs using an OA publishing agreement. Under our agreements, corresponding authors affiliated with the University of Melbourne can avoid APCs when publishing OA in covered journals. For each agreement, limitations and exclusions apply, and publishing caps are in place for some. Check covered titles and agreement details on our Open Access Publishing page when deciding where to submit. 

Most agreements in play today are Read and Publish (R&P) agreements between universities and journal publishers. They include both read access to paywalled content and (some) OA publishing, and have been replacing traditional (read-only) journal subscriptions since 2021. Most of the University’s R&P agreements were negotiated by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). To date, these agreements have only been with hybrid journal publishers; very few book publishers have adopted such agreement models. 

Repository open access

Another pathway to OA is through repositories, or digital archives. Most publishers allow the peer-reviewed Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of a journal article, conference paper, or book chapter to be shared publicly in a repository. 

Rights retention 

Publisher policies often require AAMs to be embargoed for between 6 and 36 months, meaning there is a delay before they can be made OA. This is why many funder policies, and our Principles, now require, or recommend, rights retention.  Authors can include rights retention statements in the submitted manuscripts of journal articles and conference papers to reserve their right to openly license their AAMs, allowing them to be shared in repositories without embargo. Read more about how to use rights retention statements on our What is rights retention? page. 

Our institutional repository 

University of Melbourne researchers can make their AAMs OA in Minerva Access, the University’s institutional repository for research outputs like journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. When depositing in Minerva Access, the Library ensures that publisher policies are followed, including managing any embargoes, before making any manuscripts OA. Find out how to deposit outputs of different kinds on our Repository Open Access page. 

Other repositories 

Researchers may also wish to share their AAMs in subject or multi-disciplinary repositories. Examples include Zenodo, SSRN, Humanities Commons, RePEc EconPapers, and preprint servers such as arXiv. Be sure to check your publisher’s deposit policies, if they apply, as you will be responsible for ensuring copyright and licence compliance. Learn more about repository OA on our What is Open Access? page. 

About the author 

Dr Zachary Kendal is a Scholarly Communications Specialist whose work focuses on open scholarship, including open access, open research, and open educational resources (OERs). He has worked in academic libraries for 15 years, while also working as a sessional lecturer and tutor, book editor, and editor-in-chief of an OA journal.

Cite this Thing

You are free to use and reuse the content on this post with attribution to the author. The citation for this Thing is:

Kendal, Zachary (2024). Tenth Thing: Open Access Publishing. The University of Melbourne. Online resource. https://doi.org/10.26188/25340164

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