OA publishing

The term OA publishing is often used to refer to open online publishing that involves quality assurance or some type of editorial advance reviewing.

OA publishing is sometimes described as an alternative to commercial publishing, which is not always the case. There are, for example, numerous OA journals based on author fees, which are operated by commercial publishers (such as BioMed Central). After all, OA publishing is not free. Even if no fees are paid to the authors or to researchers who work as editorial staff members and peer reviewers, costs result from practical quality assurance operations, editorial work and the maintenance and development of the publishing platform.

OA journals as well as article versions, pre-prints or post-prints stored in discipline-specific or institutional repositories are often mentioned as the main forms of OA publishing. In reality, the range of open online publishing is considerably broader and includes, for example, a variety of special publications, such as electronic books, reference works and dictionaries. What is more, the open publication repositories and/or databases of many universities still contain more reports, serial publications, dissertations and other theses than parallel versions of research articles.

(Further information about publication repositories)