Benefits of Open Access:
Federal Mandates
In August 2022, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo mandating federally funded research be made freely available to the American public at no cost. Federal agencies are all required to have updated public access policies implemented by the end of 2025.
Beginning with the Budapest Open Access Agreement 2002 and the NIH Public Access Policy of 2008 and through the development of Open Access archives like arxiv.org and journals like the Public Library of Science Open Access publication PLoSBiology, the Open Access movement encourages research to be accessible to all. Scholarly publication author agreements are often restrictive, but now offer new options to publish an article as an open access article often for a fee. Some institutions have developed Open Access policies (for example, Harvard's Open Access Policy) and funds to encourage researchers to make their research Open Access.
There are different types of open access journals with varying publishing models:
Publishing in an open access journal will usually come with a fee called an Article Processing Cost (APC) that accounts for the cost of publishing the article. These can range in cost from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
These fees vary based on a number of factors including the type of research, the discipline, the journal’s impact, and the publication’s demographic.
Sometimes these fees are covered by the researcher’s institution or a sponsoring organization.
Self-archiving is a form of open access preservation of scholarly work. An author deposits a copy of their publication in a digital repository or hosts it on a website to preserve and provide public access to their work. This may be a pre- or post-published copy.
This process can be more complicated if you have signed away all rights to your work. Tennessee State University Library’s information on self-archiving is a helpful overview of how to get started.