What is open access?

Since the early 1990s, physicists have benefited from free access to research papers through the arXiv preprint server. However, while arXiv provides access to early draft papers, peer-reviewed scientific articles have traditionally been accessible to readers through an institutional subscription. Open access, in the context of peer-reviewed journals, removes the requirement for subscriptions; articles are instead made immediately and freely available for anyone to read and reuse in their own work.

Why does it matter?

Open-access publication benefits not only authors but also the wider scientific community and society. Open access enables articles to have greater visibility and impact, generating, on average, more downloads and citations than articles published in subscription journals. Open access also allows scientific knowledge to be more widely disseminated and accelerates scientific discovery. IOP Publishing, a subsidiary of the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World, has long been a supporter of open access. We see it as a key aspect within the wider “open science” movement, which is about making scientific processes and outputs more widely accessible.

What are the types of open access?

There are two main routes to open access. The first is “gold” open access, which simply means that the final, peer-reviewed version of record of an article is immediately free to access by anyone, with the author granting liberal reuse rights. At IOP Publishing we offer gold open access in all our primary research journals, including 12 journals that exclusively publish on a gold open-access basis. Through this route we ensure that authors also comply with any open-access requirements made by their funder, including those developed by the coalition of funders who have signed up to the “Plan S” initiative. This plan says that all scientific publications resulting from research funded by public grants provided by “national and European research councils and funding bodies” must be published in “compliant” open-access journals or on open-access platforms from 1 January 2021.

Open-access publication benefits not only authors but also the wider scientific community and society

And the second route?

The second type is “green” open access, in which authors deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed article in an openly accessible repository after a 12-month embargo, in addition to publishing the version of record in a subscription-based journal. While all our subscription journals facilitate green open access, we generally consider it to be less effective than gold. This is because it can be complicated for authors as different journals do not consistently share the same rules about which version can be posted in a repository, when it can be posted and under which licencing terms.

Does open-access publishing have different peer review and editorial standards?

Editorial decisions at IOP Publishing are never influenced by whether a paper will become open access or not – that’s a core commitment of ours. Indeed, open access applies only to how an article is published rather than the submission process itself. The open-access journals at IOP Publishing apply the peer review and editorial standards that best serve the journal. For example, our flagship open-access journal New Journal of Physics publishes only those articles that its peer reviewers’ judge to be highly-significant and relevant for a broad physics readership.

How is open access paid for?

With the removal of a paywall to access articles, publishers need to establish alternative ways to ensure that the costs of providing rigorous peer review and production services can be sustainable. The most common approach, and the one used at IOP Publishing, is to levy an “article publishing charge” (APC) when an article is published. This is often paid by the producers or sponsors of that research, with funders now regularly allowing for such costs within researcher grants. Yet universities are also increasingly seeking arrangements with publishers to cover APC costs on their faculty’s behalf. IOP Publishing was one of the first publishers to develop such an agreement as an alternative to the subscription model. We now have several of these so-called “transformative agreements” in place, which are designed to help both authors and institutions shift towards open-access publishing in a sustainable and financially viable way.

What about authors with no funding?

Inability to pay for some, or all, of the APC should not be a barrier to submitting work to an IOP Publishing journal, and we assist authors from lower-income economies to publish with us. IOP Publishing has an APC discount and waiver programme available to eligible authors

A theme of International Open Access Week is equity in open knowledge – what is IOP Publishing doing in this regard?

A key part of equality in open access is enabling as many authors as possible to publish on an open-access basis. There is also a wider ambition to be more inclusive and remove barriers to wider participation in science. At IOP Publishing, we have established a diversity and inclusion committee to make sure that anyone can become an author, reviewer or editorial board member across all our journals. We have also introduced a double-blind peer-review option on several of our journals. This is where the identities of the authors, their organization and other details that could identify the authors, such as where the study was conducted, are masked from the reviewers. This assures authors that their submission will be evaluated solely on the quality of the science.

• International Open Access Week is 21–27 October (https://ioppublishing.org/open-access-week-2019/)