Open Access

Copyright law grants authors/creators a set of exclusive rights over their works and the ability to transfer one or more of these rights to another party:

• The right to reproduce the work
• The right to prepare derivative works based on the work
• The right to distribute copies of the work to the public by sale, rental, lease, or lending
• The right to perform the work publicly
• The right to display the work publicly

In traditional scholarly publishing, when your work is accepted for publication, the publisher will ask you to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement. These agreements have typically transferred all of your copyrights to the publisher.  

As a result, you no longer hold the copyright in your work. Instead, the publisher holds the copyright in your work and is now in a position to distribute it, sell it to individuals, and provide subscription-based access to it via libraries. 

Open Access scholarship differs from traditionally published scholarship. It also differs from public domain content and from scholarship that is only "free to read". The key differences are:

• OA scholarship is still in copyright, but the authors retain copyright and do not transfer it to a publisher
• OA scholarship is openly licensed and free to access, so it can be used in ways that strictly copyrighted content cannot

The open license means that someone who wants to use the work can do more than just read it. They can download it, copy it, print it, and redistribute it according to the parameters of the open license.

Most often, OA scholarship is openly licensed with a Creative Commons license. There are six licenses that offer varying degrees of "openness". These licenses can be applied to any copyrighted content, by the copyright holder, to enable broader use of content than copyright allows. These licenses are legally structured to work with copyright, so they don’t negate or cancel copyright. Instead, they give users permission in advance to access and use copyrighted content in specific ways.

In most cases, copyright in OA journal articles and OA books is held by the author(s). The author(s) apply a Creative Commons license to their work, which permits the publisher to distribute the work and readers (like you) to access and use the work, within the parameters of the license, at no cost.

Scholarly Journal Publishing

There are several models in play in scholarly journal publishing, including traditional subscription-based models, Diamond OA, Gold OA, Green OA, and hybrid journals. The graphic below describes the primary differences among the models. 

Gold OA is becoming a dominant model in scholarly journal publishing. This model requires that the author pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) in order to publish in a journal. While this results in OA articles, which is good for readers, it presents a barrier to authors. APCs are often hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Some journals are in the process of flipping exclusively to the Gold OA model. This model effectively removes the Green OA pathway, or the free self-archiving option, for authors. It remains to be seen whether these journals will be able to sustain a Gold OA model since many authors cannot afford to pay APCs.

Due in part to the potentially unsustainable shift of the cost burden to authors in the Gold OA model, publishers and libraries are experimenting with other OA models. Two of the most prevalent (right now) include Transformative Agreements (TAs) and Subscribe-to-Open (S2O).

TAs: Transformative agreements are contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that shift scholarly journal publishing away from subscription-based publishing and reading to a kind of Gold OA model, where APCs are covered by the library/institution rather than by authors. It is difficult to say if TAs are a step in the transition to a sustainable OA journal publishing ecosystem, or if they merely rename and perpetuate a high-cost journal publishing infrastructure. To date, UM has not signed any TAs with publishers.

S2O: "S2O allows publishers to convert journals from subscriptions to OA, one year at a time. Using S2O, a publisher offers a journal’s current subscribers continued access. If all current subscribers participate in the S2O offer (simply by not opting out) the publisher opens the content covered by that year’s subscription. If participation is not sufficient—for example, if some subscribers delay renewing in the expectation that they can gain access without participating—then that year’s content remains gated." (S2O Community of Practice)

Scholarly Book/Monograph Publishing

OA book publishing takes several forms, some of which are similar to OA journal publishing. Some publishers charge authors Book Publishing Charges (BPCs). Other publishers maintain a not-for-profit status and are able to use the revenue from selling OA books (yes, OA books can still be sold), donations from individuals, and funds from library membership programs to publish OA. A number of scholar-led presses are sustained by a "Diamond OA" model. Other university presses have developed innovative models, such as MIT's Direct to Open (D2O) model.

OAPEN is a fantastic resource for learning more about OA Book publishing.