7  Open Access

Publishing Open Access means publishing something in a way that can be accessed for free by anybody. There are a number of ways to publish things Open Access.

7.1 Types of Open Access

First, if you publish preprints, you already publish Open Access: preprints are generally publicly available after all (see Chapter 6). You can update preprints, so that once your article is accepted, you can update it with the so-called β€œpost-print version” of the manuscript: the version that was not typeset as it will be in the journal, but that does have all revisions implemented.

In addition, you can publish the Version of Record of an article Open Access. The Version of Record (or VoR) is the manuscript as it appears in the journal (including typesetting etc). There are also multiple ways to publish the VoR Open Access (or OA).

The way that is most consistent with Open Science principles is to publish in a Diamond Open Access journal (also known as a Platinum Open Access journal). Diamond OA journals do not charge so-called Article Processing Costs (APC). This is the price you pay to publish something OA in a Gold OA journal. At the bottom of this page, you find a list of Diamond Open Access journals in Psychology.

Gold OA journals also publish open access, but they charge authors to do so (the APC). This APC often includes substantial profit margins, and channeling public funds into corporate profit margins is ethically circumspect.

Before we go into ways to avoid this (apart from preprinting your articles and/or publishing in Diamond OA journals), there is one more type of OA journal: the hybrid journal. This is basically an old-fashioned closed access journal (also called a paywalled journal), where authors can opts to make an article OA on an article-by-article basis. Hybrid journals also charge APCs (in addition to the subscription costs they charge libraries or persons who want to read the paywalled content, essentially allowing them to double-dip and claim twice the public funds).

7.2 Gold for free

There are two ways to publish in Gold OA journals or Hybrid journals without paying the APC yourself. In the case of the first two ways, you don’t even have to pay the APC at all.

The first way is to publish in a journal where your university has a publisher deal. For example, in the Netherlands, publishers negotiated publisher deals with a huge number of journals. The Wageningen Journal Browser allows you to find journals where authors from a given university can publish for free.

The second way works if you’re in the Netherlands, and it leverages the Taverne Amendment. This allows you to publish open access if your work was funded by wholly or partly with Dutch public funds, even if you published it behind a paywall. For more information, see this site, and ask your librarians for local support.

7.3 Diamond Open Access journals in Psychology

Acknowledgement: Miriam Engels pointed out the 14 PsychOpen GOLD journals that were still missing, and Thomas GΓΌltzow added the European Journal of Health Communication πŸ™