When referring to OA publishing, it is important to distinguish between two different approaches, sometimes called Gold OA and Green OA. The distinction between gold and green is only about venues, and not about user rights, or “fee or free”. The two approaches are defined below:
Green Open Access
Gold Open Access
Hybrid
Bronze Open Access
Platinum/Diamond Open Access
It is an online service that presents publisher and journal open access policies from around the world. It covers over 5000 publishers and 22,000 journal titles for checking the publisher policy. Input the journal title or ISSN for a summary of the publisher policy.
Checking the publishers’ policies in 4 steps:
(1) Go to Sherpa Romeo and enter journal title or ISSN in the search box
(2) Read the Publication Information section, and make sure you are consulting the correct journal
(3) In the Publisher Policy section, check the Open Access policies for the Publisher Version, Accepted Version and Submitted Version of the article. Click on the plus signs to expand the sections
(4) Be alert of the following sections: OA fee, embargo and location.
These sections tell you if you need to pay to make your work Open Access (OA fee), and if you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can make that version Open Access (Embargo) and where you can deposit the version once it is open access (Location)
To get more information about Sherpa Romeo, visit its support page and download its User Guide.
When submitting work to an OA journal, you may consider the following selected open access journals and publishers. Note that the list is incomplete.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Open Access Scholarly Publishing Assocation (OASPA)
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
Open Library of Humanities (OLH)
Depositing your work in an open access repository to share your research and get the credit. The following are some selected OA repositories. Remember to check the OA policies of the publishers and comply with the copyright and licensing restrictions before uploading your published work.
Institutional repository of the University
This is the HKU's institutional repository which is a key vehicle of the university’s Knowledge Exchange Initiative. The Hub collects, preserves, and disseminates in digital form the intellectual output of HKU. It provides open access to items including HKU theses and postprints.
To get more information about Scholars Hub, visit the LibGuide of Scholars Hub.
It is a comprehensive HKU's data repository for research data and other forms of scholarly outputs. It displays and shares with others your portfolio of research using the citable DOIs, so that your research is discoverable by a wider community.
For details of DataHub and how to make use of DataHub, visit the LibGuide of DataHub.
Disciplinary or subject-based repositories
It is a premier e-print repository in physics, math, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, and related disciplines.
RePeC (Research Papers in Economics)
RePEc is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 102 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
SSRN is a repository and international journal devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities, accounting, economics, and more.
Global directory
OpenDOAR is a global directory of academic Open Access repositories and their policies. It can identify, browse and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
InCites journal citation reports (JCR) is sourced from Web of Science Core Collection. It provides the bibliometric information of the peer-review journals and offers journal evaluation and comparison in different subject categories.
One can find the OA journals in JCR by the following steps:
SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available that includes the journals and country scientific indicators. It is developed from the information contained in the Scopus.
You may explore the OA journals in JCR by the following steps:
Manuscript Matcher is a journal finder that launched by Web of Science Group.
It helps match the right journal for your manuscript with key information – the title and abstract.
You may find the OA journals in Manuscript Matcher by the following steps:
1. Go to Master Journal List, select Match Manuscript
2. Sign in with your Endnote, Web of Science or Publons accounts. You can register for a free account if you do not have one
3. Input the Title and Abstract of your manuscript, and click Find Journals
4. Add Open Access as a filter