E. H. Butler Library is pleased to announce it has reached a three-year deal with Cambridge University Press to waive all article-processing charges (APCs) from Cambridge University Press journals for Buffalo State University faculty authors. Open access publications for Cambridge University Press have waived all APCs since January. In addition to waiving APC costs for the duration of the new contract, Cambridge has granted Butler Library patrons access to an additional 397 Cambridge journals. This is a three-year transformative deal. For more information, please contact Joe Riggie, Head of Information Management, or Chris Hulsman, Electronic and Educational Resources Librarian.
In August of 2022, President Biden announced that all federally funded research must immediately be made openly available to the public. This legislation takes effect in 2026. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), has already implemented a policy that makes NIH funded research available to the public. This does not necessarily mean that the published research is "Open-Access" by the definition of the term. There are many questions still revolving around the impact of this legislation:
We will continue to monitor the impact of this legislation and share news regarding the outcomes. In the meantime, the following is a list of readings that will shed some light on this legislation and the effects on scholarly output:
Open access journals are journals whose articles are available and reusable worldwide free of charge and without restrictions immediately on publication. As a rule, contributions in journals that meet this definition are published under a Creative Commons license granted by the authors.
-Definition from the Open-Access Network
Selecting an open-access journal to send manuscripts to can be a difficult task. There are several criteria you should use to judge an open-access journal. There are also a number of resources available to you as Buffalo State University Faculty.
Be sure to evaluate the journal to be sure the publisher/journal is not predatory. For more information on predatory
Questions Used to Evaluating an Open-Access Journal
A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. (Wikipedia)
There are several types of journal open-access policies. The journals are not always immediately transparent about which type of journal they are and sometimes they have different copyright and sharing policies for each article. Below is a list of the typical open-access publication types. Always refer to your publication license to find out what your copyright to your research output allows. Feel free to use Sherpa Romeo and the SPARC author rights site (above).
Publisher makes articles fully available and accessible to the public under a Creative Commons license or similar license. The article's author or an institution pays an Article Processing Charge (APC). APCs can vary from as low as $100 to as high as $12,000. For the most part, Gold OA journals are entirely open-access.
Journals that publishes BOTH open-access articles and proprietary subscription articles. Authors are allowed to pay to make the articles open access. Occasionally a funding agency will require the research to be published open access or made available in a repository. In a sense, Hybrid journals get paid by the authors for open access AND by institutions for access to the journal. While the OA articles are free without subscription, the paywalled articles require purchase.
Journals that publish articles as open access but DO NOT charge APCs. These journals are subsidized by institutions, advertising, or philanthropy.
Journals that are free to read online but do not have a clearly identifiable license OR the license is not posted.
Allows for self-archiving and/or sharing of your work. Generally using a pre-print or post-print version in an institutional repository or other researcher network.
Access to the articles are made available by the author through a repository or scholarly social network with an author's affirmation that the have the right to distribute the work.
Black open-access refers to the illegal sharing and distribution of scholarly proprietary content through piracy.
Depending on the publisher and specific journal, an author may or may not have rights to share certain versions of their paper/manuscript. Most subscription/proprietary journals do not allow for any sharing of the manuscript, especially the publisher's version. The website Sherpa Romeo lists several journal's copyright guidelines for published articles (link above). Below are the definitions of the versions of articles:
The author's copy of the manuscript before it's been reviewed or pre-reviewed. These are often found in institutional repositories and often linked in Google Scholar. These versions are technically NOT peer-reviewed as the edits suggested by the peer-reviewers have not been implemented. Pre-Prints can be manuscripts finished BEFORE submission OR they can be manuscripts that are accepted, but yet to go through peer-review. They may also appear in social sharing research networks like Academia.edu, ResearchGate, ArXiv (multiple platforms), and other similar platforms.
The author's copy of an article after it has been accepted and peer-reviewed. These versions are not yet formatted for the final version that will appear in the print version of the journal issue or in the electronic issue. These also are often found in institutional repositories and occasionally linked in Google Scholar. They may also appear in social sharing research networks like Academia.edu, ResearchGate, ArXiv (multiple platforms), and other similar platforms.
The version a journal's publisher edits and formats for the final published version of the article. These are the versions that will appear in subscription research databases and behind journal paywalls.