How to publish

Open access publications are not held behind paywalls, meaning that any reader anywhere can access and read them.

There are different ways a publication can be made open access:

  • Hybrid Journals

    • Some journals which usually place their articles behind paywalls will allow an author to pay "author publication charges" to make their article open access to readers, liberating it from the usual paywall.
      • "author publication charges" are also sometimes called "article processing charges", and vary among journals, costing anywhere from $200 to $5,000. Information on these charges can be found on journal websites' info for authors sections.
  • Open access journals

    • Publish in an open-access journal that does not charge author publication charges.
      • 60% of the journals in The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) do not charge an author publication charge.
    • Publish in an open-access journal that funds its publication using author publication charges
  • Institutional repositories

    • Deposit your work in UND's institutional repository, the Scholarly Commons, which is openly available to anyone globally.
      • Even if you're publishing your article in a paywalled journal, you may also be able to deposit your pre-print in an institutional repository. Check Sherpa Romeo to see if your journal has a policy about pre-print publication.

Three types of Open Access publishing options:

  • Gold Open Access: may involve an "Article Processing Fee" (also known as an Author Processing Fee"). The article is then available from a publisher's platform.
  • Green Open Access: The full text of the manuscript is deposited in a publicly accessible database, most often managed by a research organization. This version is associated with being able to put on a personal blog or social media profile.
  • Diamond Open Access: funded through channels such as libraries or professional societies.

An alternative to copyright: Creative Commons licenses

Unlike traditional copyright, Creative Commons licenses allow the creator of a work to assign a license which allows for specific kinds of reuses of that work.

To license your work with a creative commons license, simply place a statement somewhere on your work specifying what type of creative commons license it has, and link back to the Creative Commons.org website so that readers can view a copy of the license.

 

 

CC BY: “This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.”

 

All you need to do to assign a Creative Commons license to your work is to place a statement to that effect somewhere on the work. See the tab at left "Licensing your work as Creative Commons", or the Creative Commons Organization's website for more information.