This is a collaborative post.
Since subscription journals are expensive with paywall structure, scholarly publication was inaccessible to the general public. To address this issue, publishers came up with Open Access at an international level. In this mode of publication, all articles are free to access through the online mode.
In other words, today open access journal articles can be read by all users through internet. Thus, academic publication is now no longer restricted to rich Western countries but it is also accessible by poorer African countries.
An Open Access publication does not have any barrier for its access, be it financial (paywall structure of subscription journals), legal (Copyright issues of subscription journals), and technical (computer and internet is cheap and accessible everywhere today).
Open access literature can not only be read by anyone on the internet, it can be freely downloaded as well for literature use and citation in related research papers. Moreover, post-doc researchers can even print and distribute the content for future related studies.
Thus, academic publications are s no longer bound by financial, legal, and technical constraints.
Owing to open access model of publishing, the visibility of scholarly articles has increased tremendously. Moreover, scholarly are today freely sharable and reused for writing related research studies.
However, there are questions on the quality of research published in open access journals. Open access model of publishing is associated with a set of principles. These principles have been laid out in the Berlin Declaration of 2003: Open Access to Knowledge in Sciences and Humanities.
Most international institutions of academic research have signed this declaration, including universities in Netherlands and other parts of Europe.
There are two types of open access journals: 1) Full open access journals 2) Hybrid journals. Now, lets’ explore what full open access journals are all about. In these types of journals, the articles are free to read to users through the internet.
There is unrestricted online access to articles. However, the article processing charges (APC) of the journals are hefty and are usually paid by the authors or the institutions at which they work.
Since most research and academic institutions today support open access, these journals are gaining lot of attention in academia.
Now, let’s explore what are hybrid journals. These are subscription journals that also follow the open access mode of publication.
If the authors or their affiliated universities pay article processing charges (APC), then these subscription journals publish their article in the open access platform and allow users to read the article free of cost on the internet.
There are thousands of hybrid journals and they are gaining attention as they strike to balance between quality and quantity of subscription and open access journals.
