Access and publishing models
Access models determine who pays for publication and who can read the result. Free access can broaden readership, but citation benefits vary, and permission to reuse or deposit an article depends on the terms attached to it.
Subscription, green, gold and hybrid access
Electronic journals, books and databases may require subscriptions paid by individuals or organisations on behalf of their staff; many subscription journals make their contents pages and often abstracts freely available. Open access provides digital full-text scientific communication online without a reader charge. It can engage a wider range of readers, including patients and healthcare consumers, by making the full text available. Paywalls and subscription fees have particularly hindered dissemination to scientific and medical communities in the global south through unaffordability.
In a subscription model readers pay for access; in an author-pays open-access model authors pay article processing charges and readers pay nothing. Authors, their institutions or research sponsors fund most open-access publishing. Institutional arrangements can remove direct processing charges from individual authors: in 2007 BioMed Central offered organisational membership for that purpose, including membership by the NHS in England and many UK universities.
Open access has three publication routes.
- Green: authors self-archive pre- and post-prints of their publications.
- Gold: publications are fully accessible through open-access journals.
- Hybrid: an article processing charge makes an individual article open access within an otherwise subscription-based journal.
Green repositories allow authors and institutions to deposit a version for free public use, while gold publisher sites provide immediate free public access to the content. The 2003 Bethesda Statement treats open access as a property of individual works, not necessarily of journals or publishers.
Publication funding and society income
Publication charges and waivers vary by venue. In 2018, PLOS ONE charged $1,495 per paper and PLOS Medicine $2,900, covering peer review, professional editing and electronic distribution, with full or partial waivers where authors or sponsors could not pay. The BMJ introduced a £3,000 research-article fee in 2010, combining print publication with online open access and offering a waiver for authors unable to pay.
Society finances can be affected by the funding model: society-linked nonprofit publishers often provide much of their societies' financial support. One librarian's 2021 view was that subscription income provides a surplus supporting society services, including benefits for residents and students, whereas article processing charges do not provide enough for peer-review administration or high-quality editorial support. Commercial publishers with substantial production investments and advertising or reprint profits have questioned the viability of author-pays publishing.
Growth and benefits for authors
The open-access movement has roots in the 1990s, and open-access publishing grew from the early 2000s into an established publication model. Predictions in 2020 and 2021 anticipated that all journals would become open access within a few years. A publication professional’s 2020 assessment was that good open-access journals became reference points in their fields within a few years of launch.
By 2022, the number of high-quality peer-reviewed open-access journals exceeded 18,000, compared with about 300 in 2003.
Open access can let authors retain more control and rights, meet publication mandates from funders, collaborators or institutions, and increase the likelihood of funding for later research. Reputation and recognition matter to authors: acceptance of open-access publishing in promotion and tenure decisions is part of its success. A 2022 critique identified author-pays costs, limited quality control, predatory publishing and weak academic incentives as limitations, with no clear incentive mechanism for original research published open access.
Open access can enable researchers in developing countries to join international collaborations and expose local or regional work to researchers in developed countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2020 study found increased international collaboration and open-access publication, with greater participation in scientific globalism among countries more affected by COVID-19 and those with lower GDPs. A 2021 analysis found scientists in low-income countries more motivated to publish openly, partly because their work might otherwise be poorly cited. Among 25 countries selected by total records in open-access registries, developed countries and developing plus transition economies grouped together were approximately equivalent in involvement in the movement.
Readership and citation effects
Free access and citation advantage are distinct outcomes. In a study of 1,619 research articles and reviews in 11 American Physiological Society journals, no evidence of a citation advantage for open-access articles was found in the first year after publication. A three-year study reported in 2011 likewise found no evidence of greater citation in more than 3,000 articles, but open-access articles had about twice as many downloads and reached about a third more unique online visitors in the first year. Publication planners should ask clients which outcomes they want when choosing a target journal.
Evidence reported in 2012 favoured more citations for articles made available online through self-archiving or open-access repositories. In 2022, Wiley's director of open-access policy reported approximately 50% more citations and three times more downloads and Altmetric attention for its open-access articles than for its pay-per-view articles, although only a small proportion of Wiley articles were then open access. A matched-pair analysis published in 2021 found that links to open-access scholarly articles received more social-media clicks than links to paid content.
Repositories and reuse terms
Self-archiving is subject to journal and publisher policies about the version deposited, its location and any conditions; transferring copyright does not necessarily prevent placing a version on a publicly accessible website. In 2003–2004, a UK parliamentary committee recommended institutional repositories through which universities' published output could be read free online. One librarian's 2021 criticism was that many repositories created in response to open access were expensive to operate through licensing and staffing costs yet little accessed; online counterparts of journal collections, by contrast, offered added value and were well backed up.
Free reading does not by itself settle reuse permission: the publication's licence or terms and conditions must be checked. Open access and data transparency are distinct questions, though they can develop in parallel and reinforce one another. Removing a paywall also does not make scientific writing understandable; access alone is not synonymous with accessibility.