Publishing Open Access

Open Access (OA) research is made available freely online, removing barriers to access and increasing visibility.

Stanford's Open Access policy requires Academic Council members to make their scholarly articles available to the public via Open Access.

The two most common ways to make your work Open Access are called "green" and "gold" Open Access.

Green Open Access

Also called "Self Archiving", this is the most common option, where the author puts a copy in an institutional repository (e.g. the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR)) or a subject repository (like SSRN or ArXiV).

Your agreement with your publisher will specify which version of your paper you can post (e.g. pre-print or post-print). Typically the publisher will not let you post the fully-formatted published version of the article, often called the Version of Record.

Gold Open Access

This is when your published, Version of Record, paper is freely and immediately available on the journals' website. This typically requires the author/institution to pay an article publishing charge (APC).

Gold Open Access publishing fess are waived for Stanford authors in many Cambridge University Press journals.

Most journals offer Open Access publishing options. You can often find a journal's Open Access policies on their website, or try:

When you publish or post your work Open Access you will likely be asked how you want to license your work. Most publishers allow you to pick from a list of Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are free copyright licenses that give individuals and organizations a simple and standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.

The Acronyms

• CC (Creative Commons): Creative Commons is the organization that created these licenses.
• BY (Attribution): Credit needs to be given to use the work.
• NC (Non-Commercial): Any copies/displays/derivative works can only be used for non-commercial purposes.
• ND (No Derivatives): No derivative works can be made, any copies/displays/distributions must be verbatim copies of the original.
• SA (Share Alike): Others can distribute your work, but only under the same conditions/license that you used.

The Licenses

CC-BY: Attribution: Others can distribute, remix, adapt, and build on your work (even for commercial purposes) as long as they credit you (the authors) for the original creation.

CC-BY-ND: Attribution-No Derivatives: Others can reuse the work for any purpose (even for commercial purposes), but the work cannot be shared if it has been adapted and credit must be provided to you (the authors).

CC-BY-SA: Attribution-Share Alike: Others can remix, adapt, and build on your work as long as they credit you (the authors) and license their work (that they have created from your work) under identical license terms.

CC-BY-NC-SA: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike: Others can remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you (the authors) and license their new creations under identical terms.

CC-BY-NC: Attribution-Noncommercial: Others can remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially. Their new works must credit you (the author) and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

CC-BY-NC-ND: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives: Others can only download your works and share them as long as they credit you (the author). They cannot change our works or use them commercially in any way.