University of Houston Libraries

Open Access can take several forms depending on how and where the work is published:

• Gold OA: Published in fully open access journals. Articles are freely available immediately upon publication. Often involves an Article Processing Charge (APC) paid by the author or funder. Please see Open Access for more information about APCs at UH.
• Green OA: Author self-archives a version of their article in an institutional or subject repository (e.g., arXiv, UHIR). Some publishers require an embargo period before deposit.
• Hybrid OA: Traditional subscription journals that allow individual articles to be made open access (for a fee). The rest of the journal remains paywalled.
• Diamond (or Platinum): OA Fully open access journals that do not charge APCs. Supported by institutions, libraries, or scholarly communities.
• Bronze OA: Journal articles that are freely available to read on a publisher's website but lack a clear license for reuse.

Publishing with an open access journal offers a number of key advantages for you and for people across all sections of society:

• Share your research with the world: OA ensures your work is immediately available to anyone online—no paywall required. You retain the copyright, giving you the freedom to share your work wherever and whenever you like.

• Get noticed: OA articles are more visible and easily discoverable, leading to higher citation rates. They're indexed, searchable, machine-readable, and compatible with text/data mining tools.

• Accelerate discovery: Your work is accessible and reusable immediately, which enables faster scientific progress through reuse, remixing, and building on your findings—with proper attribution.
• Inform the future: Open access increases the visibility and accessibility of research for educators, funders, policymakers, and the public, amplifying its impact beyond academia.

Article Processing Charge: A fee sometimes used for funding the publication of scholarly articles in an open access journal. The fee is often covered by a funding agency or the researcher's institution.

Author Rights: The rights retained by the author when entering a contractual agreement with the publisher. Open access encourages authors to negotiate with publishers to retain the rights to control the re-use and distribution of the work.

Creative Commons: A non-profit organization providing customized licenses which permit the author to retain selective rights and waive others for the re-use and re-mix of research.

Embargo: A publication embargo is the duration between the work's publication and the time it is freely available. Designed to protect the revenue of the publisher, an embargo limits access to those who pay the access cost.

Gold Open Access: Research published in a journal that is immediately and openly available when published.

Green Open Access: Posting a version of a published work in an institutional or disciplinary repository, often with a link to the published work. The repository version provides the open access to the work.

Hybrid Open Access: Publishers make an individual article freely available after payment of an article processing charge, while still selling access through subscriptions.

Mining - Data/Text: The process of deriving information from machine-read material, such as using large quantities of data and text to extract information and recombining it to identify patterns.

Open Education: A transformative movement rooted in the principle of supporting high-quality education for all. Open Education Resources are openly licensed, online material designed for teaching and learning.

Open Science: Open Science is the practice of scholarship in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes, and other research processes are freely available under terms that enable reuse, redistribution, and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods.

Postprint: The accepted article after incorporating revisions and edits resulting from the peer review process The article does not include the pagination and type-setting of the publisher's print. Also known as final accepted manuscript or author accepted manuscript (AAM).

Preprint: The first draft of an article before peer review and the accompanying edits. Also known as the submitted version.

Publisher's Print: The final published article in a publisher generated PDF file.

Repository - Institutional/Disciplinary: Commonly associated with green open access. Institutional repositories are managed by a university or organization to curate the scholarly output of the institution's researchers. Disciplinary repositories, such as arXiv and PubMed Central, collect scholarship on specific subjects regardless of the researcher's institutional affiliation.