What is open access?

“Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society.”  Berlin Declaration

When there are no financial, legal, or technical barriers to accessing a publication, it is defined as “open access,” which means that anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way that falls within the legal agreements. Open access is a large multinational movement that aims to make academic information, such as publications and data, freely and openly available online.

Open access is a scholarly communication publishing strategy that makes research material freely available to readers, as opposed to the traditional subscription model, which requires users to pay for access to scholarly information.

One of the most significant benefits of open access publishing is that it improves the visibility and reuse of academic research findings. Many international academic research organizations, including all Dutch universities and research organizations, have signed this declaration. By paying a fee, interested readers can gain access to scholarly knowledge. There is also criticism, and the quality issue merits additional attention. The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities lays forth the principles of open access (2003). 

Different ways of publishing open access: 

The Golden Route: 

1) Full Open Access journals: Publication in full open access journals via publisher platforms. There may be a fee for this route. The costs of publication, referred to as “article processing charges” (APCs), are borne by authors or their institutions. The majority of research funders embrace open access and are prepared to foot the bill. The DOAJ website has a list of fully open access journals that are available worldwide.

2) Hybrid Journals: Hybrid journals are used for publication. These are subscription publications that allow individual articles to be published openly after payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC). Researchers affiliated with the VSNU can publish for free in thousands of hybrid journals thanks to a series of agreements between the VSNU and several academic publishers.

The Green Route: The green approach involves depositing the full text of academic articles in a trusted repository, which is a publicly available database run by a research group. NARCIS, the Dutch research information site, lists all Dutch institutional repositories. NARCIS provides access to all Dutch repositories’ publications.

The diamond path entails publication in diamond journals/platforms with no author-facing publication fees (APCs). The majority of diamond open access publications are financed by library subsidy models, institutions, or groups.

Advantages of Open Access for Authors

The High Availability and Visibility – The free and unfettered access of the publication over the Internet ensures the high availability and visibility of our open access papers. All papers published with Haridra can be accessed and downloaded in their entirety for free. To read publications published by Haridra, readers of open access journals, mostly other researchers, do not need to pay a subscription or pay-per-view fee. Search engines and indexing databases are more likely to contain open access publications.

The Higher Citation Impact – Open access articles have a higher citation impact due to their widespread distribution and accessibility. It is undeniable that open access articles are cited more frequently.

Lower Publishing Costs – Authors’ institutes or research funding organizations are charged by open access publishers to cover the costs of editorial handling and editing of a publication. The cost of handling and producing each accepted article is funded by a one-time payment of an article processing charge (APC). Open access publishers’ APCs are a small fraction of traditional, subscription-based publishers’ typical income per manuscript. Because we want to encourage the publication of long articles with complete results and extensive experimental or computational details, the Haridra article processing price (APC) is the same regardless of article length.

Faster Publication – Online availability allows for faster publication in the Haridra open access journal. In Haridra, accepted publications are often published online more quickly.