Open Access Licensing

What is Open Access Licensing?

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. The main focus of the open access movement is “peer reviewed research literature”. There are different models of open access publishing.  Some require article processing charges, (APC), payable by authors or through institutional or grant funding. 

The most commonly open access licensing methods for resource output are the Creative Commons licenses (CC licences). Even though the open access publishing concept is relatively straightforward, there are some confusing aspects of open access publishing, in particular the issue of copyright and permissible re-use of content. You can get a better understanding of these aspects by looking at the Open Access article on Wikipedia and the six Creative Commons licenses for use by anyone.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. The six different license types, listed from most to least permissive are:

CC BY

This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. Credit must be given to the creator (BY).

CC BY-SA

This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. Credit must be given to the creator (BY) and adaptations must be shared under the same terms (SA).

CC BY-NC

This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for non-commercial (NC) purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator (BY)

CC BY-NC-SA

This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for non-commercial (NC) purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator (BY). If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms (SA). 

CC BY-ND: 

This license allows re-users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in un-adapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator (BY). The license allows for commercial use. No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted (ND)

CC BY-NC-ND

This license allows re-users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in un-adapted form only (ND), for non-commercial (NC) purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator (BY). 

Please see:

https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/ accessed on 30/03/2023 https://creativecommons.org/faq/ accessed on 30/03/2023

Open Access Models

Gold OA

In the gold OA model, the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal’s website. Many gold OA publishers charge an article processing charge (APC) as noted above. The majority of gold open access journals charging APCs follow an “author-pays” model. 

Green OA

Self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author also posts the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted the work, or to an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. Green OA is gratis for the author. Some publishers may charge a fee for an additional service such as a free license on the publisher-authored copyrightable portions of the printed version of an article. If the author posts the near-final version of their work after peer review by a journal, the archived version is called a “post-print”. This can be the accepted manuscript as returned by the journal to the author after successful peer review.

Hybrid OA

Hybrid open-access journals contain a mixture of open access articles and closed access articles. A publisher following this model is partially funded by subscriptions, and only provide open access for those individual articles for which the authors (or research sponsor) pay a publication fee. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is “double dipping“, where both authors and subscribers are charged. 

Bronze OA

Bronze open access articles are free to read only on the publisher page but lack a clearly identifiable license. Such articles are typically not available for reuse.

Diamond/platinum OA

Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements academic institutions, learned societies, philanthropists or government grants. 

Black OA 

The recent growth of unauthorized digital copying by large-scale copyright infringement has enabled free access to paywalled literature – see Shadow library. This has been done via existing social media sites as well as dedicated sites (e.g., Sci-Hub). On 26 January 2023 the Sci-Hub SE domain name was reported to have been taken down.

Gratis and libre

Similar to the free content definition, the terms ‘gratis’ and ‘libre’ were used in the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition to distinguish between free to read versus free to reuse. 

Gratis open access ( ) refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, without re-use rights. 

Libre open access ( ) also refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, plus some additional re-use rights, covering the kinds of open access. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access  – accessed on 30/03/2023    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub – accessed on 30/03/2023    

Conclusion

Please consult the Open Access pages on the publishers’ websites for more information on how different publishers apply the open access principles in their journals, often via the Gold, Diamond, Green and Hybrid methods.