Article Processing Charge (APC) is a publishing fee paid by authors or funding bodies to make an article open and freely accessible (Gold OA).
OA enhances visibility, discoverability, impact, citation, collaboration, recognition, etc.
Read your Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) to fully understand your rights on OA or self-archiving.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a community-curated online directory of OA journals.
A period of access restriction imposed on a version of a research output before it’s publicly available.
Plan ahead to ensure you have the funding to pay the APCs (if any) for your accepted OA articles.
Gold OA: OA publications upon publishing at publishers’ websites;
Green OA: Self-archived copies deposited in open repositories.
Subscription-based journals in which you have the option to pay the APCs to publish your articles in OA.
An institutional repository (e.g. CityUHK Scholars) preserves its researchers’ scholarly outputs, including green OA self-archived copies.
OA self-archiving policy varies among journals and publishers. Check out the journal websites or publishing agreements for the information.
OA without the paywall accelerates academic development via a wider and quicker dissemination of knowledge.
Most OA publications apply a Creative Commons license to specify rights and permissions associated with the article to protect your copyright.
Pre-print: the version an author submits to a journal for consideration;
Post-print: the accepted version with revisions made during the peer-review process.
OA unlocks research findings kept behind the paywall to enable free access to research and thus facilitates evidence-informed policy making & new innovations.
Other than publications, open data is another key element of Open Science to ensure all sectors of the economy can be benefited from data sharing and reuse.
Publishers that exploit the model of author-pays OA publishing by charging fees for publications of low editorial and academic standards.
Many OA journals are peer-reviewed and of high quality and impact ranking. Locate them in e.g. DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science, etc.
Research funders usually require OA for publications (and their data) of their funded projects. Some publishers also require data sharing.
An economical way to achieve OA by archiving permitted versions of research outputs in open institutional repositories.
Contracts negotiated between institutions and publishers that cover both subscription payments (read) and article processing charges (publish).
An open-source and non-profit browser extension (e.g. Firefox and Chrome) which searches automatically for OA versions of articles.
Authors with OA publications could reach a wider audience for a greater research impact.
Copyright must be checked for OA self-archiving in CityUHK Scholars. Contact the library via lbopen@cityu.edu.hk or the workflow.
Studies show that a paper can be published faster in OA journals than in subscription journals.
Try every means to negotiate and protect your author rights, e.g. attaching an author addendum to the publishing agreement.
Library provides active support for CityUHK authors in their OA initiatives. Contact lbopen@cityu.edu.hk for any enquiries.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). It is attributed to Run Run Shaw Library, City University of Hong Kong.
