On this page, you will find an overview of all terms frequently mentioned within Open Access topics. Click on a term to read the full explanation.
Glossary
The amount paid to publish an article in open access. Depending on the journal or publisher, APCs for open access articles vary from €400,- to sometimes more than €10.000,-.
The amount paid to publish a book in open access. The costs for open access publishing of a book vary per publisher and range from € 7.000,- to € 15.000,-.
See Read & publish deals.
Attaching a creative commons license to your (open access) publication allows you to maintain copyright, while specifying how others can use the publication. There are different types of CC licenses, of which CC BY is the least restrictive. Most research funders require or recommend this license because it allows the publication to be the most widely used. See also Guide to Creative Commons for Scholarly Publications and Educational Resources for the use of CC licenses.
Overview of open access journals that have also undergone a quality control check (DOAJ indexes only journals that require peer review). See the website: https://doaj.org
Diamond open access initiatives allow authors to publish in open access journals or on open access platforms without having to pay a publication fee. The costs are usually financed by consortia or contributions from the (academic) community.
When a work is published directly by a publisher with a Creative Commons license, this is referred to as gold open access. Authors must typically pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) or Book Processing Charge (BPC) to publish via this route.
Green open access is the process of making a version (post-print, preprint, publisher's PDF) of a publication publicly available, for example in a university repository. There are no costs involved for the author.
A hybrid journal is a subscription journal in which open access publication is also possible upon payment of an APC. Radboud University and RadboudUMC are part of national agreements with major publishers, which enables our researchers to publish in many hybrid journals free of charge.
On this website you can find which journals are included in the deals we have with publishers and under what conditions. A link to the journal browser can be found here: RU journal browser.
A publication or other research output is open access if there are no legal, technical, or financial barriers to readers: anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print or reuse such works.
Open access journals with dubious practices. These journals or publishers charge the author publication costs (APCs) without providing proper editing and peer review. See tips for recognizing such journals under: Predatory Publishers.
- Preprint = the version of an article before peer review (to be uploaded on preprint servers for community peer review)
- Postprint = Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) = the version of an accepted article after peer review, not yet formatted by the publisher
- Publisher version = the final published version, formatted by publisher, also known as the version of record (VoR)
Consortium deals with academic publishers allowing universities/UMCs access to content (the ‘read’-part), and allowing researchers to publish open access without additional costs (‘publish’-part). Several of these deals include a maximum number of articles (= cap) that can be published per year.
Cap
A number of the read & publish deals stipulate a yearly maximum number of articles that can be published open access without APC costs under the deal. This maximum is called a cap. If a cap is has been reached, Radboud authors can no longer publish open access without costs via this publisher, until the start of a new calendar year (if a Read & Publish agreement has been signed for the new year).
Our university stores its researchers' publications in a globally accessible database. Such an online archive is called a repository. Publishing scientific information in repositories is referred to as the green route to open access . For more information: radboud repository
A provision of cOAlition S funders (e.g. NWO, ZonMW, ERC) that allows authors to retain copyright to versions of their work, and gives them a right to make their Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) open access under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) in the repository of their university at the time of publication.
Amendment to the Dutch copyright act (25fa) allowing researchers to make their short scientific works (articles, chapters, etc.) available in a repository, after a reasonable period of time (six months after publication). For more information, see: Taverne