Open Access Hub: Home

     OA refers to the ability for anyone, anywhere, to access academic research free of charge upon publication. It is an alternative to traditional, subscription scholarship, free of many copyright restrictions that prevent reuse and repurposing by others. There are 4 different distinctions of OA:

     Green OA

     Gold OA

     Bronze OA

     Black OA 

     Green open access is a pre-published version of an author’s work that is archived in a repository or website, while the publisher maintains ownership of the final published version.

     Gold open access is freely available work upon publication with limited copyright restrictions. These works are published in an OA journal or in a subscription journal with creative commons licenses.

     Bronze open access is freely available on a publisher’s website with no license information available and no guarantee the work will remain in the Open Access arena. This is the most common type of open access.

     Black open access is illegal copies of publications made available in breach of publisher copyright agreements.

Other Definitions

Hybrid open access is work published in a subscription journal where the author has the option to publish their work open access. This means that some articles in the journal are open access whereas other articles are behind a paywall.

Diamond (or Platinum) open access is a gold open access publication system where there is no fee for the access of the publication for neither authors nor readers. However, with gold open access the author or funding agency pays a fee to the publication to have the article open access.