There are many reasons why groups of people involved in the scientific process increasingly opt to publish open access articles. This includes:

• Increased visibility and higher citation frequency
• Can be found well via search engines and verification services
• Faster and cheaper global access to academic/scientific information
• Support international and interdisciplinary collaboration
• Support research efficiency
• Author retains usage and exploitation rights
• Free access to publicly funded research findings
• Meeting the funding agencies' requirements

Open access publishing is no longer limited to journals and journal articles. Other kinds of works and publications, such as conference papers, proceedings, book chapters and monographs as well as presentations, teaching materials, images, graphics, software or research data can also be made openly accessible and available via Open Access.

Gold OA

Gold open access makes the final version of an article freely and permanently accessible to all immediately upon publication.

This can be in a Gold open access journal, meaning a journal which is published as an open access journal, or in a so-called hybrid journal which is subscription-based but in which - by request - individual contributions are published immediately as open access.

As costs for reading the journal or the articles the journal contains are not incurred when it comes to open access publications, publishers increasingly rely on Article Processing Charges (APCs) paid by authors as an alternative business model.

The Main Campus Library at the Johannes Kepler University Linz will pay the APCs for OA publications in part or in full through license agreements with individual publishers.

Outside of these agreements, a publication fund has been available to academic and scientific authors at the JKU since 2018 to pay the APCs for articles in scientific Open Access journals and for monographs.

As of January 1, 2024, research institutions will be able to use the so-called Open Access Block Grant to finance peer-reviewed publications resulting from FWF-funded projects. This will replace the former FWF "Refereed Publications" program and JKU authors can now contact the JKU's Open Access Office directly to process open access publication funding.

Green OA

Green open access, also referred to as self-archiving or secondary publication, means making a manuscript version of an article published by a publishing house freely available as a full text via an institutional or disciplinary repository or the author's own homepage. Articles published behind the paywall can thus also be made freely available to the public in the form of a preprint or postprint, to support the exchange of scientific research.

The Johannes Kepler University Linz operates its own institutional full-text repository: ePUB
JKU academics and scientists have the opportunity to publish via the green route, making their own research more visible and meeting the funding agencies' requirements (such as the Austrian Science Fund). Please note the following information on the topic Secondary Publishing.

License

Not everything available freely online is also Open Access. In order to ensure clarity regarding the rights of use for all involved parties, every Open Access publication should be given the corresponding license. Publishers and funding agencies generally use the Creative Commons license model for this purpose, recommending the best option free license, CC BY 4.0.

A manuscript version on a repository can also be placed under a CC BY license. However, always discuss this in advance with all involved parties, particularly existing co-authors as well as with the publisher, as in this regard there may be restrictions and requirements.

Second Publication

Before you make an article or other publication available via a repository (such as ePUB), please note that this is a copyright-relevant act of use. If you are not the sole copyright holder, you may only upload the article to the platform if you have the third party's explicit written consent (such as co-authors and/or publishers). When uploading an article, you confirm that you have clarified the legal copyright situation and you are authorized to do so.

If you have signed a publishing contract, please read if - and which - agreements have been made regarding a secondary publication. If the contract contains no references to secondary publication, you can read the terms & conditions on Sherpa/Romeo. If the journal or even the publisher is not listed, you can review the publisher's website or send an e-mail request to the publisher. These conditions concern, among other things, the type of repository, the version of the article that may be used, and any embargo period that needs to be observed.

If a publishing contract severely restricts you with regard to the possibilities of timely publication, the law on secondary exploitation rights in accordance with §37a öUrhG, enacted in 2015, may apply to you.

Predatory Publishing

A predatory publisher is an opportunistic publishing venue exploiting the academic need to publish but offering little reward to those using their services. The academic "publish or perish" scenario combined with the ease of creating a website has inadvertently created a market that can exploit academic authors.

Therefore, please always pay attention to the company you publish your articles with and make sure the company is legitimate. A checklist such as: Think. Check. Submit. can help.

These pitfalls are not only found in the publication sector. In recent years, the practice of so-called "predatory conferences' is also becoming increasingly widespread.