Open Access: Publishing Open Access

Follow these steps to publish your work Open Access:

1) Check the publisher's website to determine journal policies, or check the SHERPA/RoMEO database.

2) License your work using a Creative Commons License (CC License).

3) Get permission to use all third party copyright material (images, media, etc) included in your work, unless already licensed with a CC license. 

4) Contact the publisher or your institutional library for further help and guidance. 

5) Email UMass Boston Collections and Scholarly Communications Librarians for further assistance vetting reputable Open Access publishers, finding reliable repositories, or answering questions about copyright. 

How to Navigate this Page:

1. Author Checklist
2. Paths to Open Access
3. How Open Is It?
4. Finding and Assessing Journal Policies
5. Predatory Journals
6. Author Rights and Copyright
7. Creative Commons Licenses

There are two major paths for publishing Open Access: 

1) Green OA Publishing ("self-archiving"): Making preprints or post-prints of works published with a publisher or in a journal available to the public by depositing them in a repository, like UMass Boston's Institutional Repository ScholarWorks.

2) Gold OA Publishing: Refers to the immediate Open Access publication created by the publisher. In this case, article processing charges might apply. 

• Article Processing Charges:
  • The Healey Library's transformative (read-and-publish) agreements and support of subscribe-to-open (S2O) initiatives allow UMB corresponding authors to publish their articles open access at no cost (or, in select cases, at a reduced cost) with the following publishers. View this Library Guide to understand Healey Library support for authors who are interested in publishing Open Access.

3) Diamond OA Publishing: refers to Gold OA without fees for author or reader. 

According to SPARC's Guide: How Open Is It?,

"Journals can be more or less open, but their degree of openness is intrinsically independent from their:

• Impact
• Prestige
• Quality of Peer Review and Methodology
• Sustainability
• Effect on Tenure and Promotion
• Article Quality"

Use this graphic to understand the components that define open access journals, learn what makes a journal more or less open, and make informed decisions about where to publish.

Authors who choose to publish Open Access must understand the OA policies and copyright rules from each individual publisher before submitting work. Sherpa Romeo is an incredibly useful online resource that analyzes OA publisher policies from across the world and provides a summary of copyright and OA archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis. Search by Journal Title, ISSN, or Publisher Name to view their OA and copyright policies. 

Springer's Nature Journal defines predatory journals: "Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices."

Cabell's Journalytics and Predatory Reports: UMass Boston's contract with Cabell's Journalytics and Predatory Reports allows authors and scholars to search journals and review their policies to determine if the resource is a legitimate Open Access publisher. Users can view the integrity of journals and articles, flagging violations related to false information, conflict of interest, questionable business practices, and copyright discrepancies. Authors can also view metrics about the review process and acceptance rate of each journal. This is an important resource for determining the best resource to host your work. 

Think Check Submit is a trusted toolkit that provides checklists and resources for researchers and scholars to find credible sources and identify points of need in the Open Access publishing process.

Publishing a work Open Access is no different from traditional publishing when it comes to obtaining copyright permissions.

Before submitting an article to an open access journal, authors must discover as much as possible about the journal's policies on author rights and copyright. Authors who choose to publish Open Access retain copyright for their work under Creative Commons Licenses. A CC license allows others to freely access, copy and use research provided the author is correctly cited. The copyright-holding author would be able to use the published version of the article in any way they wish.

See UMass Boston's Copyright and Fair Use Library Guide for more information.

This video by the Open Access Network is licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 license, allowing reuse.