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What is Open Access?

Open science is based on the principle that research results should be freely accessible and reusable under the conditions permitted by their licenses. Research results primarily include scientific publications, research data, and software source code, but also extend to books, reports, and educational resources.

Scientific journals were the first to embrace open access, which has grown into a movement known as “open access”. This refers to free, immediate, and unrestricted access to digital educational or academic materials, particularly specialized scientific research publications that undergo peer review.

The benefits of open access for science and society are:

Increases the visibility of research.

Publications have greater impact (author citations and publications increase).

Increases the visibility of institutions.

Allows permanent access.

Easy retrieval of contents.

Guarantees research results preservation.

There are mainly two routes to publish open access research results:

  • The green route, or when publications are deposited in a repository.
  • The golden route, or when publications are in open access journals.

Catalonia joined the open access movement early on with the creation of the cooperative repository Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa (TDX) in 2001, and since then, the promotion of open access has been continuous and widespread. Catalan universities have been pioneers in establishing institutional repositories that provide access to their scientific output and promote open access.

Additionally, joint tools have been developed, such as the RACO repository for scientific and cultural journals, the Catalan Research Portal, which provides a single access point to the results of all agents in Catalonia’s research, development, and innovation (R&D&I) system, and the Research Data Repository for publishing datasets in FAIR mode, in line with EOSC guidelines.

In response to the growing requirements from funding entities to publish in open access, Catalan universities developed in 2015 a set of best practices and a guide of recommendations for researchers to meet the requirements for disseminating publications resulting from research projects in open access, in accordance with the Spanish Science Law and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework.

Regarding gold open access, CSUC in coordination with the universities, promotes measures to support open access based on the following key areas:

  • Gradually shift from the pay-to-read model to the pay-to-publish model.
  • Contain the cost of the scientific communication system.
  • Deposit scientific articles published by the academic community in institutional repositories.
  • Promote transparency.

For further information on open access you can consult Module 2 – Section 2 of the Open Science Course offered by Catalan universities.