Routes to Open Access Publishing
There are two systematic routes of publishing material Open Access: placing copies of material in Open Access repositories or publishing in Open Access Journals.
Open Access repositories
Open Access repositories are digital collections of research material that has been deposited by their authors (also known as self-archiving). A repository is a mechanism for centrally storing, disseminating and preserving digital material. It may belong to an institution, such as a university, or a discipline, such as physics or economics and can contain a variety of content types and formats, for example scholarly articles and preprints, reports, theses, audio, video, images and other material. Repositories expose metadata of each item thereby allowing the repository content to be found by Google or other search engines such as OAIster.
The University of Cambridge's repository is DSpace@Cambridge. More information on this and on the development of digital repositories in the UK can be found on its support webpages. An international Directory of Open Access Repositories is being maintained by SHERPA.
Open Access journals
Open Access journals are scholarly journals published electronically and available freely. Open access journals follow the same publication process and peer-review system. The difference to the traditional published journal is the business model: Open Access publishing is funded at the beginning of the process charging the author (or someone on their behalf) a one-off fee for publication rather than generating income at the end of the process from readers via subscriptions. Typically charges levied towards the author at publication lie between £250 - £2500 and are often financed by a research grant or institutional funds. Examples of exclusively OA publishers are BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.
Other journals are made available Open Access electronically along with their traditional printed edition. An increasing number of publishers (for example Springer, Blackwell, Cambridge University Press) are adopting this model and are introducing open access options within their traditional journal system. This means that an article is processed and sold as normal. In addition, however, the author can pay the publisher a supplementary fee to make the article available Open Access. Such fees are generally around £1500. In some cases this fee is reimbursed by the funding body in order to allow compliance with the funding body's deposit mandate (e.g. Wellcome Trust funded authors publishing in Elsevier journals).
A Directory of Open Access Journals is being maintained by the University of Lund.
Benefits
Publishing Open Access benefits the academic world in general by removing subscription barriers to research material. Making it available freely will increase the number of readers. For an individual researcher this means higher citations for an open access article. Publishing Open Access also allows authors to retain more rights to their own work (distribution, re-use, etc) which is useful for teaching or attending conferences.
For an economic study of costs and benefits of various scholarly communication models with a focus on measuring the impacts of open access please see Easi-OA programm by the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies.
A growing number of research funders support
deposit in an open access repository by making it a
requirement of any grant. For more
information about this see the Funders' mandates page.