Open Aceess publishing
Open Access journals
As an attempt to make academic research more freely available to all including developing countries a number of peer reviewed open access journals have been established allowing immediate free access to all publications. In this instance you as the author waive the traditional copyright regulations allowing for further dissemination of your work. Should you require some form of copyright alternative agreements are available such as creative commons (see below for more details). Open Access journals may or may not charge a processing fee. This fee is often covered by the research funder, as open access archiving is often a requirement. However it may fall to you as the author to pay, in this case many journals will waive the fee in cases of financial hardship, or for if you are based in a less-developed country. Examples of OA publishers can be found below.
Examples of Open Access journals:
African Journals Online (AJOL) is a database of journals published in Africa, covering the full range of academic disciplines.
Scientific Electronic Library Online (SCIELO) is a comprehensive approach to full open access journal publishing, involving a number of Latin American countries.
PubMed Central is an archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research.
Directory of Open Access and Hybrid Journals (DOAJ) is a one stop shop for users to Open Access journals.
Open J-Gate a directory of Open Access journals
Self archiving
The other option is self-archiving. Self archiving generally refers to you, the author, making your research available via an open access repository of some sort. This might be after it has already been published in a subscription based peer-reviewed journal (see next section on publisher regulations) or elsewhere. As an author you may choose to self archive on your personal website (maybe in a blog or using some other web publishing tools) or in an institutional repository.
Institutional repositories
An institutional repository can be a single or multi institution initiative hosting publications primarily written by its members. Typically these host a range of publications from peer reviewed published papers to, teaching materials, Doctoral theses and dissertations, conference papers, and student projects.
Documents in institutional repositories are increasingly accessible and easier to find as a result of OA search engines and directories such as OpenDOAR.
For more detail see:
Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite (2008)
OpenDOAR: worldwide Directory of Open Access Repositories
ROARMAP: Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies
