Open Access (OA) materials, also known as open content, are freely available online. Open Access is most closely associated with scholarly journal content but can also be used for books, videos, and other types of materials. Both the copyright holder and publisher agree in advance to make that content freely available. The agreement may allow content to be accessible on the publisher’s site and/or through a different system, such as an open access repository, institutional repository, or an archive. To be truly open, the agreement needs to allow unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, printing, and linking. Some copyright holders may meet some of those requirements, but not others. SPARC’s “How Open Is It?” is a useful tool for evaluating the level of open access.

Open content provides opportunities and pitfalls for libraries. Libraries may choose to incorporate open content in their collections and Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). An institution’s authors may rely on the library for help funding their open access publication, deciding where to publish, or how to create open content. Each library will need to make its own decisions about the role of open content in its collections, services, and budget lines. The variety of open access options and ways to deposit open materials can be challenging. Collections librarians, copyright librarians, and scholarly communications librarians all have overlapping responsibilities. They will need to decide how to divide up those responsibilities.

Journals

Types of Journals

Subscription/Toll-Access Journals

A subscription or toll-access journal makes its content available to readers for a fee. Collections librarians use the terminology “subscription” journal whereas “toll-access” is more common in the scholarly communications field. In this model, either the individual reader or the reader’s institution pays a fee to access the content. Readers and institutions can subscribe to the journal ahead of time to access all the journal’s content on a rolling basis or they can pay a fee per article.

Some subscription journals make select content available for free at times. A journal may make one issue freely available as a sample to entice potential subscribers or it may make articles about a certain topic temporarily free. For example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many publishers made articles about viruses, vaccinations, and public health responses freely available. Additionally, some journals only require payment for their newest articles. Those journals make articles free to read after a set period of time, such as after 6 months or a year. This is known as an embargo period.

Open Access Journals

There are several types of open access models. They are often labeled with a color to denote how open they are. The nuances of open access models/types are most often the concern of a scholarly communications librarian. Wikipedia lists the color and descriptive language for each model.

An open access journal uses a similar editorial, submission, and evaluation process to a subscription journal. To make the published article freely available to readers, many journals charge the authors a publication fee. This cost recovery method is called an Article Processing Charge (APC). Some libraries or institutions offer open-access publication funds or have fee reduction agreements/memberships with journals and publishers that cover APC costs for authors. Authors may also use grant funds to cover this cost.

Hybrid Journals

A hybrid open-access journal includes both subscription articles and open access articles. Authors have the option to pay a fee to make their articles open access or, if no fee is paid, then their articles will reside behind a paywall. Some argue that hybrid journals are “double-dipping” by charging article processing fees for authors while still charging libraries for subscriptions. Publishers counter that they factor the amount of open access for individual titles into their subscription pricing model.

Since 2018, an international group called cOALition S has been heavily advocating that publishers transition to immediate open access. In the meantime, hybrid journals still play an important role. Many academic faculty prefer publishing in hybrid open-access journals because the journals are usually more well-known and have higher impact factors. Some publishers also use the hybrid model as an intermediary step before moving the journal to a fully open access model. For an institution, one way to move a journal from a subscription or hybrid journal to an open access model is to engage in a transformative agreement. More information on transformative agreements can be found in the next section.

Open Access and Library Budgets

Institutional Memberships and Open Access Funds

Some OA publishers offer institutional memberships that eliminate or reduce APCs for authors. Examples include BioMed Central, PeerJ, and PLOS. Institutions sometimes pay for these memberships out of library collection budgets, research funds, or consortial agreements. Before purchasing a membership, consider the number of faculty you have that could potentially publish in those journals, as well as how many have published in the past. For instance, if the membership costs $10,000 per year and provides a $1,000 discount to authors, your institution will need to have at least 10 publications before breaking even on the deal. These factors should inform the agreement terms and pricing.

As an alternative to institutional memberships, some libraries offer OA funds to provide authors with assistance in paying for APCs. In this model, the library designates a certain amount of funding to pay for OA publication fees. This funding may come from the collections budget. The library will often determine the criteria authors need to meet in order to qualify for the funding. Some institutions choose to limit funding to junior faculty or to those faculty who do not have grant funding. Additionally, some libraries only pay APCs for certain journals and may exclude predatory or even hybrid journals. The library will need to set clear criteria for evaluating the journal in which its authors want to publish. Many libraries have established these funds and then later had to cancel them due to declining budgets or an unmanageable jump in applications and expenses.

Examples of Library Open Access Funds:

• University of Arizona’s Open Access Investment Fund
• University of California Davis’s Open Access Publishing Support

Transformative Agreements

As the demand for open access publications (both from funders and governments) increases, more libraries and publishers are signing transformative agreements to try to move toward open access publishing. Transformative agreements incorporate rights to publish as well as rights to read content. This is in contrast to traditional subscription agreements which only cover the ability to read the journal’s content whereas publishing open access in that journal is a separate fee. Transformative agreements are called Read-and-Publish or Publish-and-Read agreements, depending on the emphasis of the agreement. With Read-and-Publish agreements, the institution pays for reading journal content and also covers some or all publishing/APC fees. In Publish-and-Read agreements, only publishing/APC costs are paid and reading is free.

Predatory Publishing

The emergence of Open Access publishing has given rise to unscrupulous actors who attempt to exploit the pressure on researchers to publish. They collect money from authors without performing most or any of the tasks that reputable publishers do (e.g., peer review, editorial oversight, vetting conflicts of interest). They also utilize the common practice of not allowing authors to submit works to multiple journals and hold their work hostage until a fee is paid. When deciding to add a journal subscription to your collection or link to open access content, it is important to determine if the content is predatory. Even journals listed in PubMed Central can be predatory or low quality journals published by well known and well-resourced publishers. Think. Check. Submit. offers a useful checklist of items to consider when determining whether a journal is predatory.

Pre-Evaluated Lists

There are a few sources that evaluate open access publications and have created lists of “approved” and “not approved” resources. A subscription to these tools may be requested from the collections budget to support scholarly impact and research credibility. Cabells is one well-known subscription resource. Each source uses their own criteria to vet titles and decide which are reputable and which are predatory. Maintaining them is a lot of work and they can become outdated quickly as new publications start fairly frequently, and publishers may change their business practices. These types of lists are helpful tools but they should not take the place of researcher or librarian critical appraisal.

Repositories

Open access repositories and archives allow copyright holders to upload their content and make it freely available.

There are two main types:

• An institutional repository is created and hosted by an academic institution for their students and researchers to deposit their content only.
• A disciplinary repository, on the other hand, hosts materials from people at many different institutions about the same theme, subject, or discipline (e.g., medRxiv, Dryad).

An archive collects and preserves information about an institution or organization. It can have both physical materials and digitized versions of those materials. All of these tools make it easier for people to learn about an institution and benefit from the work of people at the institution. They do not usually include a peer review process. Repositories and archives can host many different kinds of content, such as conference presentations, theses, preprints, and published articles. Libraries can encourage people at their institution to add their content to a repository.

Collections librarians may decide that they do not need to subscribe to a particular title if enough of its articles are freely available in a repository. Libraries can also link to these materials in their systems to enhance the content the library pays for. License agreements may include sections about adding content from that publisher to a repository.

Preprint Servers

Preprint servers are another way that researchers can make content freely available, outside of what would be traditionally referred to as open access. Researchers post their manuscript to a preprint server before it goes through the traditional publishing process. It is a way to share important findings quickly, because the publication process can be slow, and receive feedback prior to manuscript submission. Preprint servers often focus on a particular discipline. For example, there are preprint servers for health sciences (e.g., medRxiv.org) and biology (e.g., bioRxiv.org). Preprints have become more influential in health sciences in recent years, particularly due to the COVID-19 outbreak. PubMed now includes content from preprint servers.

Linking to preprint servers is another way that collection development librarians can enhance their libraries’ paid collections. Preprint servers can be supplemental resources for content the library pays for.

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are open access materials that are specifically created for and used in educational contexts. They may be presentations, lesson plans, videos, textbooks, or virtual simulations. Because these resources are open, they can be reused, adapted, and mixed with other materials. Each institution can customize the resource for their own needs. That customization is helpful but can also lead to a proliferation of different versions that can be overwhelming to consider. With health sciences content, currency and quality are especially important to consider.

With respect to collection development, OER can be included in your Open Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) and the collections budget might be used to provide grants to faculty creating OER materials. They can be a component of the library providing course content to students and encourage collection development librarians to find complementary materials to add depth and breadth in areas not well covered by OER texts. OER, as a term, can be juxtaposed with “affordable course content” which usually refers to books, ebooks, or other content used in courses that the library pays for and students access with no additional charges.

Collection development librarians may consider adding selected open educational materials to their collections. The materials may replace or enhance the content the library pays for. For example, some publishers do not provide institutional subscriptions to their ebooks. Collections librarians may consider comparable open textbooks instead.

Finding the right OER for a specific need can be time consuming. To help get you started, Fox Valley Technical College’s guide lists some health sciences OER resources; Washtenaw Community College has a multi-subject OER guide; Red de Repositorios de Recursos Educativos Abiertos CVSP / BVS has a collection from Latin America and South America (mostly written in Spanish or Portuguese); and Open RN includes nursing OER textbooks with associated virtual reality simulations.

Adding Open Access Items to Your Collections

Libraries need to decide what Open Access material they want to make findable through their OPACs. Collection development librarians can be a part of the discussion regarding what to include in the catalog. For example, collections librarians may select specific journals or open access text repositories (e.g., HathiTrust) to include. When deciding to add OA materials to your collections you should investigate if MARC records or links to content are available from the vendor/publisher. Many OA platforms, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, have metadata ingests for library OPACS. They may also be available more directly as an option to ‘turn on’ in your knowledge base with no external ingest of records needed.

Online Courses for Professional Development

• Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians is a course on open education and open access from Creative Commons.