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Guide to Open Access Publishing

Selecting trustworthy journals, publishers and conferences

UWC Library Online Publishing Support Service

The UWC Library's Online Publishing Support Service is pat of the Research Support & Client Services section in the library. This service assists researchers with any publishing related queries. These guides list tools to help authors find and identify appropriate journals for publication purposes. Training sessions help authors understand Open Access, journal selection tools and identify predatory journals and conferences.

Open Access Defined

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Peter Suber (2015)

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives (SPARC).

When publishing in Open Access, authors retain copyright of their published work.

Open Science is the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods (FOSTER).

Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control (Wikipedia).

Green & Gold Open Access

Green Open Access - Unbranded manuscripts known as pre-prints (work in progress) and unpublished formatted articles known as post-prints (accepted for publication) may be deposited into an institutional or disciplinary Open Access repository. The published version of the article is made available after an embargo period determined by the journal or publishers' policy. Authors may pay a reduced article processing fee or may not pay at all.

Gold Open Access - Articles accepted for publication are made available for free immediately on publication without any embargo. The published version can also be deposited in an institutional and disciplinary repository.  Authors are usually charged an article processing and Open Access fee.

Open Access Explained

What is Open Access?

UWC LIBRARY & INFORMATION SERVICES

University of the Western Cape,

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Bellville,

7535

Tel: 021 959 2946