Open access is a platform which allows the unrestricted online distribution of the articles from journals and books without any financial obligation. That is the content published with open access is accessible to all without any fees. All material published in open access is licensed under Creative Commons licenses.
Mainly open access focuses on peer-reviewed research literature thereby open access covers all types of published researches inclusive of peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, monographs, and images.
The open-access is categorized based on the color scheme that is “green”, “gold”, and “hybrid” open access; however, several other models and alternative terms are also used.
Gold Open Access
In this model, the publisher publishes all articles and its related content on the website and is available immediately free of charge that is the reader does not need to pay any charges to read, download and use it as a reference for their work. The key advantage of making publications freely accessible right from the moment they are first published, which means they can be used immediately. The author bears the publication cost (Article Processing Charges, APC) in this model. The articles associated with gold open access grant wide-ranging exploitation rights, plus the immediate availability also achieves a level of visibility which has a positive impact on how widely a publication is disseminated and how frequently it is cited and are licensed for sharing and reuse via creative commons licenses.
Green Open Access
Green open access does not offer the same legal framework for content licensing. As a result, (scientific) exploitation is only permitted within the confines of the legal restrictions of copyright law. That means that the author’s contract has to be carefully reviewed to enable an article to be re-used in a way that fulfills all the legal stipulations. There is no uniform rule governing the open accessibility of publications because different publishing houses impose different embargo periods before making the articles freely available.
Hybrid Open Access
Hybrid open access refers to a publishing model in which subscription-based journals allow authors to make individual articles gold open access immediately on payment of an article publication charge.