Scholarly Communication

Open Access (OA) publishing was coined as a term in 2002 with the Budapest Open Access Initiative.  Open-access journals are free to read and do not require the transfer of an author’s copyright, so researchers retain their intellectual property.

The goal of OA publishing was to:

• Address inequities of access to research. Upend the dynamic of wealthy countries and well-funded institutions having greater access than lesser-resourced institutions and countries. 
• Publisher acquisition of researchers' copyrights. Authors retain rights to their scholarship, rather than giving away their intellectual property for free and institutions buying back access to the research they support. 

While the majority of OA journals worldwide do not charge to publish, the US market has overwhelmingly adopted the APC or APF—article processing charges or fee model—to replace subscription income despite the elimination of most print journals.

This APC is a:

• Fee paid by author(s) after peer review 
• Shifts the burden of payment from readers to authors (or their funders)

To learn more about publishing OA and paying for APCs, view the Publishing Support pages.

To learn more about open-access publishing, view the OA guide. 

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder or government that requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open-access by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository ("Green OA") or by publishing them in an open-access journal (Gold OA). (borrowed from Wikipedia OA mandate).

In the US, any scientific publication that receives federal funding must be made publicly accessible on the day it is published.

Agencies are updating their public access policies to make publications and research funded by taxpayers publicly accessible, without an embargo or cost, as directed by the August 2022 OSTP memo. 

Currently, agency policies vary; make sure to read the appropriate one in detail. A few things to consider:

• Some agencies will not provide more grant funding if you do not follow these rules.
• Some agencies will allow publication in an open-access journal in lieu of depositing your article in their specified repository, and many, if not all, will also let you include an OA journal publishing fee in your grant.
• Although most agencies require you to deposit at least the accepted manuscript (also called the final peer-reviewed article), they will also accept the final, published version.
• Some publishers will submit your article to the correct agencies. Check to see if yours offers this service.
  
  RESOURCES:
• See Science.gov for public access plans and guidelines page
• Browse the SPARC Article and Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency
• National Science Foundation (NSF)- Deposit a public access publication into NSF-PAR  View help guide for depositing