Open Access

Open Access (OA) publication is essential in scholarly communication in a digital setting, and science-related agencies are implementing policies that support the transition to new publishing models.

Research funders, including FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) the main public agency supporting science, technology, and innovation, have made OA publication a requirement.

FCT’s policy is available since May 2014.

The core of the policy on open access to publications arising from FCT-funded research is that all publications of research outputs, subject to peer-review or another form of scientific review, should be deposited in one of the open access repositories hosted within RCAAP as soon as possible, preferably immediately on acceptance for publication. An embargo period is allowed, after which the full content of the publications should be made freely available, at no cost. The policy applies to papers in scientific journals, conference proceedings, posters, books and book chapters, monographs, Masters and PhD theses. FCT funding encompasses project grants, studentships and fellowships, career development contracts (FCT Investigator).
– FCT Open Access Policy (PT)
– FCT Open Access Polity (ENG)

 

Open Access Initiatives

Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)– BOAI is a public statement of principles relating to open access to research literature and was released February 14, 2002, and is a result from a meeting held in Budapest by the Open Science Institute on December 2001 to promote open access. It opens with the following statement:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) – the statement was drafted in a meeting in 2003 at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and starts with a definition of Open Access Publication.

An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. “The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).”

   – Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge (2003) – is an international statement on open access and access to knowledge. It was drafted at a conference on open access hosted in Berlin by the Max Planck Society in 2003.

The Berlin Declaration’s definition of an Open Access Contribution:

“Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:

1. The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.”

   – Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge

 

Plan S (2018)– is the initiative of cOAlition S funders, a group that comprises national research funding organisations and charitable foundations together with the European Commission and the ERC. Plan S’s main principle is:

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

COAlition S advocates for:

• Science open for all
• Revision of the incentive and reward system of science, using the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) as a starting point
• Changes to the publishing system when “There is no valid reason to maintain any kind of subscription-based business model for scientific publishing”
• Immediate open access with no embargo period
• Initiatives that establish robust quality criteria for Open Access publishing, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

Find more about COAlition S

 

FAQ

What is Open Access?

Open Access is free and unrestricted online access to publications: to read, download and re-use, subject to proper attribution. OA removes the paywall barrier to all those who do not have access to institutional or personal journal subscriptions, making the access free to the user.

What is Green Open Access?

To achieve green Open Access, the author uploads their accepted manuscript to the web and makes this file available for download. This enables the author to publish in a traditional journal while making their research more open by providing an additional, free route for users to discover and read the article.

This is possible if the author deposits their accepted (peer-reviewed) manuscript rather than the final, published version of the article. Institutional research repositories such as RUN facilitate green Open Access by giving researchers at the University a place to upload their research. Temporary embargoes may apply, where the publisher asks for access to be restricted for a fixed time after the publication.

What is Gold Open Access?

This is a way of making the version of record, the article as it appears on a journal’s webpage, freely available from the point of publication. Some journals make all their content freely available, while others offer a hybrid publication model, making some articles freely available to any user and others only available to subscribers. As there are no subscription or access fees, the cost of publication may be met by the publisher, particularly in the case of journals published by Universities or learned societies, or by the author. This fee, which varies across journals, is known as an article processing charge (APC) and is usually paid by the author’s institution or research funder.

What is Hybrid OA

Hybrid open access journals contain a mix of open access articles and closed access articles. A publisher following this model is partially funded by subscriptions and only provides open access for those individual articles for which the authors (or research sponsor) pay a publication fee (APC).

What is Diamond/Platinum OA?

Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as academic institutions, learned societies, philanthropists or government grants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

What is Black OA?

“Illegal, or “black open access”, provides access to a large part of the pay‐walled article output which cannot be found in repositories”. The name was suggested by Björk in 2017 (Björk, B.‐C. (2017), Gold, green, and black open access. Learned Publishing, 30: 173-175. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/leap.1096)

 

Open Science

Universality is a fundamental principle of science (the term “science” as used here includes the humanities): only results that can be discussed, challenged, and, where appropriate, tested and reproduced by others qualify as scientific. Science, as an institution of organised criticism, can therefore only function properly if research results are made openly available to the community so that they can be submitted to the test and scrutiny of other researchers. Furthermore, new research builds on established results from previous research. The chain, whereby new scientific discoveries are built on previously established results, can only work optimally if all research results are made openly available to the scientific community.

Plan S: Making full and immediate Open Access a reality

Open Science allows the sharing of knowledge among the scientific community, society and companies, thus making it possible to increase the recognition and social and economic impact of science. Open Science is more than the open access of data and publications, is the openness of the scientific process, reinforcing the concept of scientific social responsibility. https://www.ciencia-aberta.pt/about-open-science

To know more about Open Science check out the website Ciência Aberta