Open Access Week: Gold OA

Yesterday, I focused on the costs associated with making an article open access when it is published in a traditional, subscription-based journal (referred to as "hybrid OA"). How does this compare with gold open access, or publishing in journals that are fully OA?

First, this route to open access can still involve the payment of an APC, but not in all cases. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) "indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals." A majority of the gold OA journals listed in DOAJ do not charge APCs (i.e., around 8,900 of them, or 73% of the total). Similarly, although on a much smaller scale, all except one of the forced migration-related OA journals I highlight in this table do not charge an APC. At the same time, even when gold OA journal publishers do charge an APC, most will also offer fee waivers (Lawson, 2015).

Second, there are a number of initiatives in the Global South to develop regional journal portals for home-grown gold OA journals, most of which do not charge APCs but rather are supported by funding from governments, non-profit societies, or other types of arrangements. Some examples:
- African Journals Online (AJOL) was initially an INASP project but is now managed by an independent non-profit in South Africa. It hosts African journals and provides training and support to journal editors in the region. It has also served as a model for other country- and region-specific platforms developed under INASP's Journals Online project.
- SciELO and Redalyc in the Americas have both been around for a while; the former was launched in 1998 and the latter in 2002. They promote electronic publishing, serve as aggregators of journals, and facilitate access to OA research.

Third, the "prestige and tradition" issue raised yesterday and the pressure to publish are factors that influence all academics' decisions about where to publish. While the proliferation of open access journals has widened the scope of where researchers can potentially publish, it has also attracted some less-than-reputable publishers to the scene. This in turn has influenced some peoples' perceptions of the quality of OA journals, with many assuming that they are not as reputable as traditionally published journals. Think.Check.Submit is a resource that can help authors identify trustworthy journals and make informed decisions about which are the most appropriate ones to showcase their research. Helpfully, it is available in quite a few languages.

In addition, because of the rigorous criteria that must be met for a journal to be listed in the DOAJ, inclusion confers a quality seal and enhances trustworthiness. DOAJ specifically set out to increase journal representation from the Global South within its database by establishing an ambassador program that sent a team of scholars to various developing countries in order to promote best practices and publishing standards. (Read more about the program here.)

Finally, here is a forced migration research example of an initiative to encourage publishing in gold OA journals: CFPs have recently been issued for several special issues of Laws and Social Sciences. These are two open access journals published by MDPI, a large gold OA journal publisher that normally requests APCs to cover its publication costs. However, authors will not be charged a fee for publication in any of the aforementioned special issues because the APCs "are fully funded by institutions through the Knowledge Unlatched initiative"! I will circulate a separate post that provides more details for these and other CFPs for OA journals.