Open access journals

Open access journals are online publications that are entirely available to the public immediately after publication. While traditional scientific journals collect income from subscription fees, open access journals rely on other means of funding.

A common way to acquire funds for a journal is to charge article-specific fees (APC = article processing charge) from the authors. Such fees may range from a hundred up to thousands of euros. However, most open-access journals are financing their operation in some other way than by APCs (= Diamond Open Access). Usually the journals are published and funded by scientific associations, universities and higher education institutions or other academic organizations.

Some open access journals get funding from outside sources in the form of membership fees, sponsoring and collectively organized funding. For example, the SCOAP3 collects annual support payments from its member organizations. This enables open-access publishing for a number of high-quality journals on particle physics. The University of Jyväskylä is a member of the SCOAP3 consortium and participates in the funding of several other actors developing open science: JYU's support for open science infrastructures

Hybrid journals

Besides the fully open publishing channels, there is a group of journals that charge both for reading and for publishing. These so-called hybrid journals are subscription journals in which it is possible to publish individual open access articles against a publication fee. Even though the journals might contain some open access articles, most of the content is subject to charge (i.e. requires subscription).

The hybrid model is clearly the most expensive form of open access publishing due to this double-dipping. In addition, it has been shown that the article processing charges of hybrid journals are more expensive than those of open access journals.

Most research funders do not recommend or allow publishing using the hybrid model. Funders committed to the Plan S initiative (e.g. the Academy of Finland) allow publishing in hybrid journals only through transformative agreements that enable open access publishing without any additional costs to the authors. JYU's open access agreements with publishers