Open Access Publishing

Gold Open Access is open access research outputs that are facilitated by a publisher.  The published version of a publication is immediately, permanently, and freely available for anyone with internet access to read or download from the publisher site at the point of publication.  However, there are different options to consider when it comes to Gold Open Access Publishing:

• Publisher funded OA – In this model, the publisher makes your work open at no cost to you or your institution.  It may also be called Diamond/Platinum OA.  Many small and regional society publications use this method.  They are typically hosted by universities or other research organizations and use internal resources and grants to fund publication.
• Author funded OA – Publishers will often make content free and open for readers, but pass along the costs of publication to authors in the form of Article Processing Charges (APCs).  If an author has no grant or department money to cover this charge, they are personally responsible for it.  APCs can range anywhere from under $500 to several thousand dollars for publication in a big-name journal.

Green Open Access is a type of open access where a version of a publication is freely available via an institutional or subject repository, or other web-accessible digital archive. 

Authors can make their work open by posting an article after publication in an open repository, such as PubMed Central or Research Discovery, or by posting an unpublished article on a preprint server, such as ArXiv.org, or other repository. 

One advantage to choosing Green Open Access instead of Gold is that there is no cost associated with self-archiving and sharing your work, as there often is when making your research Open Access through a publisher. 

Pre-prints and accepted manuscripts are the two most common types of work made available through Green Open Access Publishing.

Certain journals make some of their content free and open while shielding other articles behind paywalls. They often frame this as an "author choice" model, where individual researchers can decide whether to pay APCs to make their article open. 

Publishers sometimes claim that this is a transitional model, and that hybrid journals are a necessary step on the way to full Open Access.