Open Access

No forms of open access are truly free—there are always costs associated with publishing and distributing scholarly work. The largest cost is for the support infrastructure. This includes things like managing websites and repositories, providing network bandwidth, or editorial services. Other costs not usually considered, are the time and effort of authors, peer reviewers, and others who typically volunteer their time. In traditional publishing costs are met by the publisher charging the end-user either by selling a copy of the work or by selling a subscription to a journal or other service. Because open access does not charge the end-user, these costs need to be met by other means. The most common business models for open access are listed below.

For journal articles and research papers, there are currently two principal business models for supporting OA:

• GOLD OA. Gold OA is the closest equivalent to traditional publishing. The only real difference is that the author usually pays an article processing charge (APC) or other publication fee instead of the end-user purchasing a copy or subscription. Everything else, including the peer review process, is unchanged.
• GREEN OA. Green OA operates on a completely different model. In green OA, authors self-archive or self-publish a version of their work. If the work is also traditionally published, there may be restrictions on self-archiving the published version, or any version, of your work. Check with your publisher or with Sherpa Romeo to see what is allowed. Papers can be archived in a repository, preprint server, or on a faculty website among others.
• PLATINUM or DIAMOND OA. This is really a subset of Gold OA, the difference being that there is no APC. Some university presses operate on this model, with the funding provided by the university rather than the contributors. In other cases, the university library may have a read/publish agreement with a publisher that funds the submissions.

For a complete list of OA journal business models along with all their variants, see the Open Access Directory's OA journal business models page.

For books and book chapters, there are currently two principal business models for supporting OA:

• Institutional Support or Subsidy. In this model, the institution directly pays all the costs associated with publishing and distribution and makes the finished products freely available. In some cases the support is provided through a university press or the university library. Support can also include time or release from other duties for faculty authors to write OA books. This modle is most commonly used for oepn textbooks and other open educational resources (OERs).
• Book Publishing Charge (BPC) or GOLD OA. This is the closest equivalent to traditional publishing and the finished product is distributed through a traditional publisher. The only difference is that the author pays a BPC instead of the end-user purchasing a copy of the book. Be aware of copyright with this model—sometimes the publisher will not allow the author(s) retain copyright of their work.
• GREEN OA. In this model, a version of the book or chapter is made freely available online, usually through an institutional repository, while another version is sold to cover the costs. While rarely used for whole books, it is more common for chapters, where individual faculty authors will self-archive the chapters they wrote with their own institutions. Publishing agreements often limit limit self-archiving to the final accepted version, not the final printed version or “version of record.”

There are many other models besides these that have been adopted by various publishers and research institutions. For a more complete list, see the Open Access Directory's OA book business models page.

Gold and Green OA are the two most prevalent models for OA, but neither truly fulfills the ideal of Open Access. In the case of Gold OA, processing fees can be prohibitively expensive, often costing thousands of dollars for a single journal article. Also, commercial publishers frequently restrict permissions to use or reuse work and prohibit machine analysis or data/text mining of published work regardless of its open status. Green OA, while avoiding these issues, has issues of its own, principally the lack of peer review implicit in self publication or self-archiving earlier versions of published work. This model comes closest to fulfilling the promise of OA, but some publishers, particularly commercial publishers, still restrict permissions and machine access.