Q1:What is Open Access?
Here is a definition from Professor Peter Suber, an acknowledged expert in this field:
"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and movies do not carry over to research literature.

OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or disciplines, such as physics and economics. Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else's permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their postprints. When archives comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative, then they are interoperable and users can find their contents without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain. There is now open-source software for building and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it. The costs of an archive are negligible: some server space and a fraction of the time of a technician.

OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer, funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications, advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers waive the fee for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased an annual membership. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and we're far from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination." http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm

Q2:What Open Access and Open Archiving models exist for Journals?
The main four types of Journals open-access publishing are: Open Archiving; Delayed Access; Author Pays; Open Access.

Open archiving A large number of publishers, including Elsevier and Oxford University Press, voluntarily allow authors to archive their accepted manuscripts on their own or their institution's website. Acceptable versions vary between publishers but can include:

• peer-reviewed copy


• pre-peer-reviewed copy


• publisher PDF (smaller number of publishers).

Publishers that allow the published PDF to be archived include:
Cambridge University Press
IEEE. Some publishers will impose an embargo before a copy of an article can be made open-access. The embargo can vary according to length and area of application, e.g. Oxford University Press applies a 12 months embargo on the sciences and a 24 month embargo on the social sciences.

Publisher's policies A publisher's policy regarding open-access will often be found on their website. However the SHERPA RoMEO database provides a searchable database of publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies for pre-prints and post-prints.

This service is maintained by SHERPA, with support from JISC and the Wellcome Trust.

The following shows statistics for the publishers listed in the SHERPA RoMEO database.

Delayed Access Delayed Access is an option where after a certain period of time (e.g. 12 months in Sciences), the articles are made available to non-subscribers. Examples of publishers using this model are: Certain publishers listed in Pub Med Central

Author Pays Articles are in subscription journals as per the standard publication model. However, on payment of a fee, by an author, an author's institutions or funding body, the article will be made available to all, immediately after publication. Examples of publishers with this model are:

• Cambridge Open


• Open Oxford (60 titles)


• Taylor and Francis (234 titles)

Open access journals are published journals which are available on the internet and are available without payment. Journals in this category can be found in:

Directory of open access journals This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 3445 journals in the directory. Currently 1168 journals are searchable at article level. As of June 2008 188830 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

Macquarie University is already involved in publishing open access journals, for example, SCAN

Q3:What is the situation for Conference papers?

The current situation with conference papers is not clearly defined. Most conferences will allow the author to retain copyright. In these cases, authors are free to archive copies of their papers on their personal or institutional website.

For some conferences where the conferences proceedings are being published commercially, the author is requested to sign copyright to the relevant publisher. The publisher's copyright conditions would need to be checked before an author is able to archive a copy of the conference paper.

An example of a publisher who will allow archiving of conference papers is IEEE, who will in fact allow a copy of the publisher version to be archived onto an institution's website or repository.

Q4:What is the situation for Books and Book Chapters?

Most publishers hold the copyright for their books and do not allow authors to archive copies of the author's version of the manuscript. Publishers are increasingly producing electronic versions of their books, and providing access to them either individually or as part of collection.

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