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This page contains information on open access publishing and access to open education resources.

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What is Open Access?

Are you considering publishing in an open access (OA)journal? If so, your high-quality content could be made open-access (freely available to the world), which has consistently resulted in higher future citations and broader social impact of your work) at no cost to you! There are a few things you should know first:

Subscription? Green Open Access? Gold Open Access? Hybrid Open Access? What does it all mean?!

Click on the images below for a full-sized graphic illustration of the various publishing modes. 

Traditional (subscription-based) publishing: 

graphic illustrating Traditional Subscription Publishing: Publicly funded researchers conduct research and write up results. Manuscripts submitted to subscription journals & reviewed by peers. Manuscripts accepted for publication. Authors transfer copyright to publishers. No rights retained by authors. Published articles are locked behind paywalls. Libraries purchase subscription or public pays per article to view on publisher's website. Even after paying for access, readers are granted little or no reuse rights beyond permission to read. Slow scientific progress, poor return on public investment.

"Green" Open Access publishing:

image illustrating the Green Open Access publishing model: Publicly funded researchers conduct research and write up results. Manuscripts submitted to subscription journals & reviewed by peers. Manuscripts accepted for publication. Authors assign copyring to publishers, but retain the right to disseminate an OA copy (of the accepted manuscript) via open access repositories. Published versions of articles accessible to journal subscribers immediately. Accept manuscript versions may be embargoed temporarily. After embargo period, public can download the open access copies from repositories. Accelerated scientific progress & increased return on public investment.

Our University OA repository for scholarly content is called Minds@UW. 

"Gold" Open Access publishing:

illustration of the Gold Open Access publishing process: Publicly funded researchers conduct research and write up results. Manuscripts submitted to subscription journals & reviewed by peers. Manuscripts accepted for publication. Authors retain copyright & grant publisher 'licence to publish'. Authors may be required to pay publisher an 'article processing charge' to cover publishing costs. Published versions of articles immediately accessible to public. Public granted reuse rights under open licenses. Accelerated scientific progress & maximised return on public investment.

 

Hybrid OA is not quite any of these. Hybrid OA means a traditional, subscription-based journal publisher lets the author choose to pay a higher Article Processing Charge in order to make their individual article OA (freely-available to all readers) right away. Note that the APCs for this model average much higher than for green or gold OA models.

OER Textbooks

Open Access and Gray Literature