Fee-based | The traditional model that revenue is based on subscription fee, license contents, advertisements, and reprint fees. |
Free access | Also known as Bronze open access. It means the content is free to read. However, you are usually not allowed to reproduce that content, sell, or modify it. |
Open Access |
Content is available online to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself. Author reuse rights very depending on type of creative common licenses. Publication costs shift to authors, and indirectly to funders. |
UC-Publisher Relationships | |
Gold OA | Journals do not charge subscription fees and authors pay the article processing charges (APC). |
Green OA | Also known as self-archiving, authors deposit pre or post-prints to an OA digital repositories and pay no fee (with 6-24 months embargo). This can be an institutional or a disciplinary repository such as PubMed Central. |
Hybrid OA |
A subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. It is mixed revenue model of subscription charges and pay-to publish options. Authors pay a subscription-based journal a publication fee to make their individual article open access immediately upon its release. Hybrid OA remains significantly more expensive than full OA (~50% more per APC). |
Bronze OA | Delayed OA. Free to read on the publisher’s website. The publisher controls copyrights. |
Platinum OA | Free to the authors and free to the readers. Usually sponsored and published by nonprofit societies and associations, e.g., the Beilstein-Institut and the Electrochemical Society. |
This 2-minute video provides an introduction to open access publishing from Taylor & Francis Group.