What is Open Access?
Open Access is a central part of Open Science1 and, in short, means making scholarly information, research findings, research data, and digital cultural objects freely available online—without any financial, technical, or legal barriers.
Publishing open access works in digital form only and along the main idea of being “as open as possible, as restricted as necessary.”
To ensure that standards of scholarly publishing are met, open access publications (texts, or other media formats) undergo quality assurance procedures just like traditional publications.
For a short primer on open access publishing, visit the platform open-access.network. Additionally, the platform features good reasons for and possible reservations regarding open access, as well as subject-specific options, such as open access in the arts or art history.
1 See, for example, as defined by the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021).
The Academy’s Open Access Policy
The “Open Access policy of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna” was adopted and published in May 2015.
Open access publishing
Open access publishing (Gold open access) refers to scholarly works being published with open access publishers, or in open access journals, under an open license, typically a Creative Commons license. These may include scholarly journal articles, contributions to edited volumes, as well as monographs and entire edited volumes.
Open access publications differ from traditional ones, first and foremost, in how their cost models for producing these open publications work. Depending on the model, costs for open access publications are paid either by the authors or their institution, or through alternative funding options, such as crowdfunding.
The Academy provides support through dedicated funds to cover open access costs for scholarly journal articles (article processing charges, APCs) and book publications (book processing charges, BPCs). See all open access funding options at calls.akbild.ac.at.
If an open access publication does not require authors to pay a fee, this model is called diamond open access. Authors can publish in open access free of charge, regardless of their institutional affiliation.
Please note that the Academy does not provide funding support for paying for individual open access publications (so-called hybrid open access) in traditional, or subscription-based, journals.
Self-archiving
Self-archiving (Green open access) refers to making works which already have appeared in a journal or with a publisher freely available in an open access repository. Works may be self-archived at the same time as the content appears with a publisher, or after the work has been published.
In any case, it is important to check any possible legal requirements before self-archiving a publication, and to clarify copyrights for any third-party materials.
Several publishers have adopted their own self-archiving policies, in which they allow depositing the final accepted manuscript version (AAM) in an open access repository, sometimes after a certain period (embargo). If your publisher does not support self-archiving, or only to a limited extent, it could be worth negotiating with them and asking to have your author agreement modified accordingly.