Be open!

Publishing in open journals

If you need to provide immediate access to a published article, ie. the golden way of Open Access, you need to choose an Open Access journal to publish in.

Information about openness should be traceable on the pages of the journal, but it is not always easy to find it – look into the section About the Journal, Open Access Policy, Instruction for Authors. The journal’s website or the individual articles should also contain information on under which Creative Commons license the content is published.

Another way to try to find this information is through the Directory of Open Access Journals. The journals included in the database are continuously checked for quality.

APCs

Because articles are freely available on the Internet, publishers lose their subscription income and have to pay for the costs of publishing the journal from other sources — either from the budget of the institution that publishes the journal (often for journals published by universities and professional institutions) or through fees (APCs — Article Processing Charges). These are usually not paid for by the author himself, but by his institution. Royalties are eligible costs in applications for research grants, so it is appropriate to think about them when writing applications.

In the Directory of Open Access Journals, you can filter journals that do not require APCs — limit the search to journals and you can select the APCs-No filter in the left sidebar.

Hybrid journals

Some journals offer the possibility to provide open access to specific articles, while the remaining content of the journal is accessible only on the basis of a subscription — these are so-called hybrid journals. When publishing in hybrid journals, the university pays double — for the subscription of the entire collection of journals and for open access to the article from this collection. Publishing in some hybrid journals is also more expensive than in fully open journals. This is an inefficient use of the money available to the university

Autoarchiving of a published article

The second method is known as so-called auto-archiving, which means that the author publishes in the traditional way in a journal of his choice and ensures open access to the full article in an open repository.

Different publishers have different conditions regarding self-archiving. You are not limited in the self-archiving of the preprint, which is the text of an article that has not yet been reviewed.

Most publishers allow postprint autoarchiving. The postprint is the version of the article after the peer review, which, however, does not yet have a typographic modification of the journal in which the article is published. For the purposes of self-archiving, it is appropriate to select the latest version of the postprint (i.e. the content of the postprint is identical to the published article). Some publishers allow you to easily download a postprint. The correspondent author might have postprint, because he communicates with the editors and sends individual versions of the article to the journal. It would be appropriate in the author’s team to agree on the storage of all versions and communication with the editors.

Some publishers also allow the final version of an article to be published in the repository.

The publication of articles in the repository is taken care of by the Library, which checks the policies of individual journals and publishers. So you do not have to worry about an article being published in the repository for which it is not allowed.