Open access

One aspect of ensuring that all those who are interested are able to consume research products is open access, which refers to manuscripts being made freely available and reusable. If a manuscript is truly ‘open access’ then the author should have full copyright permissions, which means they can use the final manuscript however they wish.

To be reusable, the manuscript should be made available through a Creative Commons (also known as CC) licencing, which offers more flexible usage rights for your work. As you learned in Week 2, there are various types of license, ranging from fairly permissive (e.g.: others can access, copy, use and adapt the work as long as credit is given to the author), to more restrictive (e.g.: credit must be given to the author, non-commercial uses only, and the work cannot be altered). You can find out more about licensing on the Creative Commons website.

As well as being related to accessibility, you can consider open access to be another form of transparency. It makes manuscripts openly available, for the same reasons as you learned about in Week 2, for making data and materials openly available.

Imagine you’re in a library searching for a book that you need for an assignment. You find the perfect one on the shelf, but when you try to open it, the pages are glued together. You can see the cover and read the blurb, but the valuable content inside is completely inaccessible to you. This is what it’s like to not be able to access an article because it’s behind a paywall.

Open access can take many different forms:

  

Green open access

With green open access, the work is openly accessible from a public repository, such as a preprint server. This is a way researchers can provide access to their research without cost to themselves or their readers. Usually this means sharing a version of the manuscript openly (i.e. a version of the manuscript that has gone through the peer-review process, but has not been copy-edited or typeset by the publisher). The manuscript becomes freely available, either at the point of deposit or after a publisher's embargo period, usually six to twenty-four months.

  

Gold open access

With gold open access, the work is immediately openly accessible upon publication via the publisher’s website. Usually this means the researcher paying a fee to the publisher, which can be up to several thousand pounds. Some universities have a deal with certain publishers, and will pay this charge on behalf of the researcher.

  

Diamond open access

Diamond open access (also known as platinum open access) is where an organisation covers the cost of publication so that neither the reader nor the author pays to read or publish. The work is immediately openly accessible upon publication via the publisher’s website, without cost to researchers or their readers. If diamond open access is possible, why don’t more publishers offer it?