"Gold" open access journals are journals that follow the typical processes of publication such as peer-review and typesetting, but publish their articles freely on the internet with no embargo period, making the material available to everyone at the time of publication. These journals may be pure OA journals that only publish open access content, or they may be "hybrid" journals, which publish most of their content behind traditional paywalls, but allow certain articles to be publicly available.
In most cases, authors are charged a fee to publish Gold open access known as APCs (Article Processing Charges). While the majority of OA journals do not charge researchers, many high-impact hybrid journals can charge thousands of dollars in APCs.
Diamond Open Access refers to journals that are free for readers to access and free for authors to publish in.
Unlike the Gold, Diamond journals don’t require any article processing charges (APCs) paid by authors or subscription fees paid by libraries to fund the costs of publishing.
Diamond journals leverage their research community and volunteers, and are usually funded by universities, governments, societies, or associations to make the research they publish freely available online.
Predatory publishing is an exploitative practice that uses the promise of fast, open access publication to extract money from authors and researchers. Often, predatory journals will charge high fees to publish in their journal, but provide little to no peer review, editing, or oversight of the content. In practice, this means they take money from (usually) well-meaning researchers but do not provide any of the services that a publisher is supposed to provide. This means that good research can languish in poor quality journals with little research impact, and that bad research can be easily published due to the lack of peer review or editing.
Most open-access journals are reputable and of high quality, but predatory publishers often use the term "open access" when describing themselves, making it difficult for researchers to evaluate the journals they may want to publish in. Some indicators to look out for when evaluating OA journals include:
Adapted from the Grand Valley State Libraries Open Access Journal Quality Indicators, released under a CC-BY-NC license.
It's important to select an open access publication that is the right fit for you both academically and financially. We recommend the use of these tools to locate an open access publisher for your works.
Publishing open access has many benefits for the researcher, including: