2023 definition from the OSTP and the National Science and Technology Council: “The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.”
Pre-print platforms support Green Open Access. Most pre-print platforms are STEM based but there is one significant platform for the humanities and at least one significant server in the social sciences. What follows is a list of the more prominent pre-print platforms. Pre-prints are usually completed research (as opposed to work in progress) but have not been peer reviewed. In many cases, journals allows authors to post the pre-print of their accepted (post-peer reviewed) article. In this case, you would also find a link to the published journal at the journal site.
Green, Gold, and Diamond are notable models of OA publishing that describe how you make your scholarship openly accessible and the costs (or lack thereof) associated with it. Open Access publications may be accessed through a journal or publisher, through an author's personal website, or through other openly accessible platforms. The Sherpa Romeo database and the Directory of Open Access Journals platform provide information about the type of open access provided by individual journals.
Although the Penn Libraries does not have funding to support APCs (author processing charges) to publish in open access journals, if you are looking to publish in an open access journal, all of the journals listed below have received subscription or membership support from the Penn Libraries, which should allow you to publish without a fee or at a reduced fee. Please contact your subject librarian for more information. This list will likely continue to evolve:
The Penn Libraries have partnered with other NERL libraries to establish a three year pilot through which authors who have published with many Elsevier journals and who were affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania at the time of publication will retroactively have their articles made open access. For each year of the agreement, Elsevier will flip five years of publications.
By the end of the pilot, 15 years of published work, constituting tens of thousands of articles authored by leading researchers, will be newly available to everyone at no cost to them and regardless of institutional affiliation.
For more information visit our Elsevier FAQ
*Or another Institution connected with the NERL negotiated agreement.
