Open Access Publishing
Open Access (OA) refers to free, unrestricted online access to research outputs. It benefits authors by increasing exposure to their work, helps meet funding body requirements, and benefits the public by giving them access to scholarly publications.
CQU has an Open Access for Research Outputs Policy which requires research outputs to be made OA as soon as possible. This can be arranged at time of publication (such as publishing OA via a journal) or after publication (such as depositing a manuscript into Research Elements for it to be made OA within the publisher’s guidelines).
Making your research Open Access
When publishing in journals, authors can choose to publish OA when submitting their article so that once it is published, it is immediately free to readers via the journal website. This option often incurs an Article Processing Charge (APC) charged to authors. You may be eligible to have this APC waived by selecting a journal eligible under a Library Read and Publish Agreement, or staff can apply for funding through the Research Division’s Open Access Journal Scheme (staff or affiliate login required).
There are different types of journals you can publish openly in. A hybrid journal is a subscription journal that allows authors to publish OA with an APC, otherwise articles are only available to subscribers. A gold journal is fully open access and charges APCs, while a diamond journal is fully open access and does not charge APCs.
Also known as Green OA, this is where an article has already been published in a subscription journal. All major publishers allow authors to make the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version of their published article OA in an institutional repository like CQU’s aCQUIRe; this allows readers to access the AAM without a journal subscription. The AAM is the final peer reviewed manuscript sent to the publisher before any publisher formatting is applied, see example. To arrange Green OA, upload your AAM into Research Elements (StaffNet link, staff or affiliate login required). After you provide the AAM file, Library staff will make it OA via aCQUIRe and will ensure it complies with the publisher’s conditions, including releasing after an embargo where prescribed. This method can still be used to meet funding body requirements when a title wasn’t published OA via the journal.
Copyright and Licensing
In standard subscription publishing agreements, copyright is typically transferred to the publisher who then controls the work and grants limited rights back to the author. When publishing OA, authors typically retain copyright and instead have a Creative Commons licence applied to the work, which allows third parties to use and distribute the article without needing to ask for permission.
A Creative Commons licence is an alternative to traditional copyright which allows end users to reuse content from the article, such as republishing a figure in their own work or hosting copies of the paper on other websites in order to further disseminate it. In all cases, users copying a Creative Commons article must always acknowledge the original authors of the work. There are six Creative Commons licences variations which place various caveats on reuse (e.g. some allow commercial reuse and others don’t).
When publishing OA, the journal may just apply their default Creative Commons licence, or they may offer you a choice from a limited selection of options. Understanding the attributes of the different licences will help you select the appropriate one. The most open (CC-BY) is preferred wherever possible, but sensitive research may require a more restrictive licence.
