What is Open Access?

Open Access enables barrier-free access to academic information such as journal articles, books, dissertations, conference proceedings etc. Open Access publications are freely available and may be used freely.

Creative Commons licences provide the legal structure to define the terms of use, while the copyright remains with the authors. There are various Creative Commons licences. The most important licences for open access are CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. These licences allow unrestricted distribution on condition that the authorship is correctly cited. In addition, with CC-BY-SA the work must be distributed under the same licence.

"Creative Commons Licences Explained" by eCampusOntario, CC BY 4.0

Reasons in favour of Open Access

Open Access promotes barrier-free access to information for all, increases the visibility and citation rate of publications, facilitates the use of information and thus promotes collaboration, research and innovation.

You can find more reasons in favour of Open Access - as well as some reservations - on open-access.network.

Paths to Open Access

There are several ways to publish Open Access:

Source: open-access.network (2021), Pathways of Open Access (CC BY 4.0 International) 
Gold Open Access

Publications are published directly Open Access under a free licence through a publisher or an institution. The work is immediately available to everyone free of charge. Publication costs are not covered by the readers ("subscription fees"), but by the authors ("author fees"). For authors, publishing can be financed in various ways (e.g. third-party contributions through a founder such as the SNSF or institutional publication funds). But the author must take care of the financing.

Diamond Open Access

Publications are published directly Open Access under a free licence through a publisher or an institution. The work is immediately available to everyone free of charge. The publication costs are not covered by the readers ("subscription fees") or the authors ("publication fees"), but by institutional funds (e.g. research sponsors, library consortia, etc.). The author doesn't have to take care of the financing.

Green Open Access

Publications are first published conventionally through a publisher and - after a possible embargo period - second published Open Access on institutional or disciplinary repositories (for Lucerne: LORY or LARA). This requires rights clearance with the publisher which is done by the Open Science Team.

Hybrid Open Access

A journal is published conventionally, although authors have the option of "buying out" their articles in order to make them Open Access. This is controversial, as publishers earn twice through subscriptions and Open Access fees. The hybrid approach also enables Read&Publish agreements between institutions and publishers. Here, institutions receive access to subscription content (Read) and researchers can publish their articles Open Access at no additional cost (Publish). Hybrid Open Access is therefore recommended as part of a Read&Publish agreement.