Open Access: Concepts, Principles, and Funding

What is Open Access?

Discussions of predatory journals can only be fully understood in the context of Open Access (OA). Open Access emerged in response to two key changes: the rising costs of journal subscriptions and the growing demand to make scholarly knowledge freely accessible, regardless of financial or institutional barriers.

Open Access refers to scholarly publications that are made freely available online to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This facilitates global knowledge exchange, accelerates research, and enables broader access to scientific findings beyond academia.

Open Access and Its Funding – A Brief Overview

Open Access publications are freely accessible online, but their production still incurs costs. A fundamental distinction is made between Gold Open Access - where articles are published directly in an Open Access format - and Green Open Access, which refers to the secondary publication (self-archiving) of research outputs (see further information here).

For the funding of Gold Open Access, several models exist (Keller 2017, Waidlein et al. 2021). Journals may be financed through publication fees, institutional support, or consortial funding arrangements. In order to understand predatory journals, the most relevant funding model is the use of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Gold Open Access: Immediate Open Acces Publication

Gold Open Access means that research output is published directly in an Open Access venue - such as a journal or edited volume - and it is immediately available online without access restrictions.

To enable free access for readers, publication costs are often covered through APCs. These fees may be paid by:

• institutions (e.g., university libraries) on behalf of their researchers,
• research funders through project-based funding, or
• the authors themselves.