Open Access

Open Access (OA) means free access to research results, mostly in the form of articles. That mainly means that once a paper is published, it can be accessed without a paywall. But it goes beyond the financial aspect. Open refers to the ability (or not) to reuse and redistribute the content (figures, tables, …) of a document. In that sense, the licensing on Open Access documents is less restricting than non-open ones.

Open Access Publishing Models

Open Access publishing can follow different paths and models. We list here the main ones, some variations can exist between listings [1] ^and [2].

Gold Open Access: Gold OA refers to a publisher that produce only Open Access documents, with license similar to Creative Commons. However, such publisher usually charges for publication, directly to the authors, or their institutions. Gold publications are usually less frequent, or specific to a given subject (for example, conference proceedings).
Hybrid: The hybrid model is a special case of Gold OA where the journal offers the option to the authors to pay to make their paper Open Access. Not all the articles of the publications are open. In this category, one can also shelf the cases when the journal chooses some articles of interest to make them Openly accessible, as a way to attract readership or promote the journal. The author may not have a say in the process (on the positive side, there is no fee to pay either).
Diamond or Platinum Open Access: This OA type is financially free for both publication and viewing, and is supported by other means. It can be that the publisher is subsidized by an institution or industry, or it can have a freemium economic model where one can pay or subscribe for additional features or services.
Green Open Access: The green OA model refers to an independent platform where authors can publish their paper in Open Access (self-archiving). Such platforms are usually maintained by institutions or government (in France: HAL). Free for the author, Green OA platforms usually don’t offer any peer review of the content (but review of the metadata is possible). Green platforms are the right place to publish postprints (in which case, the paper has been through peer review). The preprint of a paper can also be published in Green Open Access, in order to get a fast publication of results.
Pirate Access: As in many fields where digital content is not free, illegal platforms have appeared to make access to restricted (paywalled) resources available to anyone. These platforms are not publishing platforms, they just distribute article that have been accessed in an unauthorized way. Not all papers are accessible via this channel, there is no guarantee that the content is the correct one, and it is definitely an illegal practice. However, the growth of these platforms participates in the current questioning of the commercial subscription model [3].

Legal and funding requirements

Access to some funding grants (such as EU or ANR projects) will usually come attached with a certain level of Open Access requirement (funds for the payment of Open Access fee to the publisher might be included in the grant).

Depending on the country where the author operates, they may have additional constrains and options.

In France, since the “Loi pour une république numérique” [4] the authors of public funded research can publish their postprints in open access after a maximum embargo period of six months (for fundamental sciences, one year for human and social science fields).

Protecting authorship’s rights

In order to protect the authors’ rights and go beyond the publishing-the-postprint-in-open-access-after-a-maximum-embargo-of-6-months possibility, a new approached is being proposed: the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) [5].

The cOAlition S, a European consortium of funding and research agencies, is pushing RRS has a way for the authors to keep complete control of their publishing rights on the postprints. By asserting their rights on the manuscript from the very start of the paper submission process, the RRS allows the author to publish the postprint as soon as the paper is accepted, since the publications rights on the author’s version have not been ceded to the journal.

Guidance on how to implement the Rights Retention Strategy can be found in the guide Implementing the rights retention strategy for scientific publications from Ouvrir la Science (the French comity for open science).

Note

On a smaller scale, the article’s authors can first publish their figures on Open Access platforms (such as figshare) and included them in their manuscript with the proper references. That way, the figures are excluded from the publisher rights on the paper content [6].

Benefits and disadvantages of Open Access

There are clear benefits to publishing in Open Access: visibility of the research, ease of sharing the results, … Additionally, it frees the authors from the whim of the editor: if a journal wants to change its editorial line and stop publish results on a particular subfield (for example, as a way to re-center its publication on another field and attract subscriptions), authors of the said subfield may have to publish in other journals with less impact, or change the focus of their publication. Thanks to Open Access platforms, in particular in the Green model, authors may still publish on their own fields, without having to accommodate commercial editors’ preferences. Finally, publication online marks authorship. By putting online your idea, method, results, it is now out in the world as yours and should not be reused by others without proper citation.

As for the disadvantages… Peer-review of papers is usually associated with some kind of fee (whether paid by the authors, the institution, the conference organizers, or a subscription model – sometimes a combination of these), and publishing directly in Open Access may skip the review step, making it less appealing for researchers. Still, self-published documents almost certainly have been through some kind of reviewed process before being put online (not counting the case of postprints deposited on a Green OA platform), but not in a blind, anonymous way that ensure the quality of research (however, we should note that the majority of research are honest and do their best to produce scientific results of quality anyway [7]).

As of today, papers that are not in Open Access (either their editor version or the postprint) are not counted in evaluating a CNRS researcher (Here, we note that when the CNRS researcher is not a primary coauthor of a publication, they may not have the ability to ensure a publication is in OA form). Finally, a significant hurdle to overcome for Open Access is the general resistance to change.

Conclusion on Open Access

Even thought there are still some hurdles, publishing articles in Open Access is easy enough today for publicly funded research in France: by publishing of the postprint after six months on the HAL platform, the threshold for Green Open Access is low and can be met by the vast majority of publications in CNRS.

Additionally, we should get use to publishing in Open Access other documents (working papers, notes, seminar slides, …), as those are still valuable contribution to the scientific discussion (and institutions should include these in researcher’s performance evaluations).

Footnotes