Choosing a publication channel

Publishing research results in the form of an article in a scientific publication is an established practice in most disciplines.

Traditionally subscribers, e.g. research organisations, have paid submission fees to the publishers and received reading permissions to the articles published in a given journal. However, a common goal is to guarantee free and unrestricted access to all publicly funded science to all. Hence in new funding models the costs of publishing are shifted away from readers elsewhere and articles of the journals are freely accessible. In this so-called open access publishing model it is usually the funding agency of the research project or the organisation to which the resarcher is affiliated who pays the publication costs.

New innovative publishing platforms and peer-to-peer networks used by researchers on the internet together with the demands of open science are further transforming the traditional model of scientific publishing.

From 2021, the funding model of the Ministry of Culture and Education rewards open access publishing with a coefficient of 1.2 for open access publications. A publication is considered open access if it is published open access in an open access or hybrid journal or made open access by self-archiving.

Major research funders in Finland (e.g. European Commission, Academy of Finland, Business Finland) require or recommend open access publishing in the projects they fund.

The Academy of Finland follows the Plan S principles of immediate open access to research publications in projects funded from Academy calls opened after 1 January 2021.

Open access publishing refers to the free dissemination of scientific knowledge. A scientific publication is openly accessible when both the scholarly community and the general public have free and unrestricted access to it on the Internet.

Open access publishing increases the visibility, use and impact of publications.

There are different ways authors can provide open access to their article:

• Gold OA journal: The article is immediately available to the public. These journals generally require that the author pays a specific fee for publication (Article Processing Charge, APC).
• Green OA journal: The article is published in a subscription-based journal and self-archived. Depending on the publisher's terms for self-archiving the article may be freely available either immediately or for example after an embargo period of one year.
• Hybrid OA journal: The article is published in a subscription-based journal, but which allows individual articles to be made freely accessible by paying an article processing charge. Articles for which an APC has not been paid may be self-archived if the publisher's terms and conditions allow this.
• Bronze OA journal: The articles of the journal are freely available on the publisher's website, but without an open access license.
• Diamond OA journal: Journals which publish open access without charging authors article processing charges
• Black OA: Pirate services that offer paywalled articles for free (e.g. SciHub).

Scholarly monographs and compilations are also published open access.

In the spirit of open science, researchers are also encouraged to post non-peer reviewed manuscripts (i.e. pre-prints) into pre-print repositories, such as Zenodo, Arxiv and BioRXiv.

• Visibility and accessibility of research improve
• Open access articles have excellent findability on the Internet
• Probability of being cited increases
• Research quality improves

In open access publishing the author retains the copyright when the publication has an open license.