To understand how new ways of publishing have emerged and established themselves within the Open Access movement, it is important to know how publishing of so called traditional journals works. A common denominator of all the different types of publishing mentioned in this text is that they apply quality controls, usually peer reviewing, to gauge the scientific standard of the articles published.
Scientific journals can be categorized according to how they make their content available, how they handle copyright and how the publishing is financed.
- Traditional journals require subscriptions for access, which leads to limited circulation and availability. The copyrights are normally signed over from the author to the publisher. Read more below.
- Open Access journals provide unlimited circulation and availability of articles on the Internet. The author retains the copyrights. Publishing costs are normally covered by author fees, or in some cases membership fees or grants from research institutes or funding agencies. Read more below.
- Hybrid journals are traditional journals that offer the author a choice between publishing the traditional way or Open Access, i.e. either for free but with limited circulation (since reading the article requires a subscription) or by paying a publication fee to make the article freely available. Read more below.
One web based service in particular provides a comprehensive list of scientific quality controlled Open Access journals and hybrid journals:
DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals, lists more than 4000 quality controlled Open Access journals and also contains information on hybrid journals
Traditional journals
Publishing in traditional journals is still the prevailing form of publishing. Within many disciplines it remains the only relevant option for publishing an article in a highly ranked scientific journal (for more information on ranking with the Impact Factor measure, follow this link).
It is normally free of charge to publish in a traditional journal, but in some case author fees apply. The publishing and distribution costs are mostly covered by subscription fees – i.e. the readers of the journal pay for access. Many publishers of traditional journals, however, also allow the authors to parallel publish their articles in for example institutional online archives, provided certain conditions are met. Read more about how authors can make their publications freely available in such open archives in the section Parallel publishing.
Open Access journals
Open Access journals have emerged as alternatives to, and criticism of, the traditional journal publishing market. The basic idea is that research findings are to be published on the Internet, free of charge and available to all, to read, cite and download. Open Access journals are characterized on the one hand by making the journal contents freely available on the web, and on the other hand by letting the copyrights of the articles remain with the authors. It is of paramount importance to point out that scientific Open Access journals, like traditional ones, are quality controlled.
Of the world’s quality controlled scientific journals today, about 10-12 % are freely available. DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals, lists over 4000 such journals in April 2009.
There are some different financing models for Open Access journals, commercial as well as non-profit ones. These models have been developed as a criticism towards the traditional publishing financing system. In some cases, Open Access journals charge an author fee on accepting an article, which means the author’s department or research funder pays. Funding agencies may have specific portions of their grants set aside specifically to cover such publication fees. In other cases there are no fees at all. There are also some examples of discipline related financing – for example CERN, the largest high energy physics laboratory in the world, recently decided on an initiative aiming to make all scientific publication on particle physics freely available.
Hybrid journals
Several commercial publishers are now offering a publishing option where the author can pay a fee to make his/her specific article Open Access, within an otherwise traditional journal. That particular article is then freely available to all, even if the rest of the journal content is available by subscription only. The author, as an added bonus, also retains copyright of his/her article. Traditional journals with this added publishing option are called hybrid journals. Again, articles published in this way have undergone the same quality controls as the ones published in the traditional way.