Publishing models

Open Access journals charge a fee for publishing articles. Pure open access journals make all articles published freely available at no cost to the reader. Pure open access is also known as gold open access.

Subscription journals don't charge for publication, but do charge everyone who wants to read the articles. At the University of Borås about 50% of the media budget is spent paying subscription fees. Individuals who don't have anyone paying subscription fees for them have to pay a one-off charge to rent or buy individual articles.

Hybrid journals are subscription journals that offer the option of publishing individual articles with open access. In those cases they charge both the subscribing institution and the author wishing to make the article open access. Hybrid journals have been criticized for "double dipping" - making both the readers and the authors pay for the open access articles.

Transformative deals is a model where institutions (in Sweden this is done through the organisation Bibsam) pre-pay to publish articles open access. This means individual authors don't have to pay any charges to publish open access. Offset deals can cover both open access and hybrid journals.

Here you can find more information on which journals the University of Borås has offset deals with.

Green open access - make your locked articles accessible

Many publishers allow authors who haven't paid for open access to make their articles "green" open access (also known as parallel publishing). This means that the article is made available in an institutional database like DiVA or in a subject repository such as PubMed Central or arXiv. At the University of Borås everyone is encouraged to make articles available through green open access. This to disseminate the university's research more widely, and make it available for everyone to read.

Green open access is usually only allowed after an embargo - a waiting time of at least six and up to 48 months after publication. In most cases the authors aren't allowed to use the journal's PDF version, but must use the version (in Word or PDF) that was accepted for publication. Don't let your articles remained locked up - contact Signe Wulund for help with green open access!

Toward an open future

Together with many of the major research funders, the EU is working to make all publications rising from research they fund open access. The initiative Plan S deals with what kind of rules and guidelines are going to apply for researchers and publishers. As a first step in this plan all research funders who have signed Plan S (including the EU) will require that anyone who receives a grant from them after January 1 2021 make their publications either gold or green open access immediately upon publication. The cost for this is not intended to fall on individual researchers, but will be funded by the Plan S signatories.

Read more on the Plan S website.