Join UC Libraries in celebrating International Open Access Week 2026.
Research is a conversation. We build upon the insights and findings of those who’ve preceded us, and those we work in parallel with, to move our areas of study forward. Ideally, those conversations also push beyond the boundaries of the academy, informing work done by practitioners, industry, activists and government. But, not everyone is having the same conversation.
Paywalls and the considerable cost of journal subscriptions make research inaccessible to most people outside of research institutions, and access even within those institutions can be variable, particularly for our colleagues in the Global South. The goal of open access is to remove the barriers between research and those who can build upon it and employ it.
It’s hard to argue with that goal, but reaching it can be complicated and confusing for authors. UC Libraries can help. If you’re new to open access, or if you’ve struggled with navigating the open world in the past, this post unpacks a few open access basics and the supports open to UC scholars.
What Is Open Access?
Open access describes any publishing model that provides barrier-free electronic access to scholarly content. Open access content is not behind a paywall or gated in any other way and is available to anyone with an internet connection. The exact form that this takes varies from publication to publication with variations in how much content is open, how it is funded, and how it is licensed.
Two Routes to Open Access
There are two broad routes to open access with a lot of variation within each: publisher open access and self-archiving. Both routes can give your research a citation advantage and broader disciplinary reach.
Publisher Open Access
Publisher open access is when an article, book, or book chapter is made freely and openly available on a publisher’s website. This can look very different from publication to publication. A journal or edited book, for example, may be fully open access (gold) or a mix of open access and subscription content (hybrid). Frequently, a fee, called an article processing charge (or APC), is charged to authors to support the cost of publication (in lieu of subscription revenue). For journals, APCs can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to over ten thousand dollars, but the median list price is estimated at roughly $3,290. It’s worth noting that diamond open access journals, common in law, the humanities, and social sciences, do not charge APCs.
Self-Archiving
Self-archiving, also called green open access, is the practice of depositing the author accepted manuscript (pre-copy editing and typesetting but post peer review) into a subject (e.g., SSRN), funder (e.g., PubMed Central) or institutional (e.g., Scholar@UC) repository. The accepted manuscript is then linked to the final version of the article on the publisher’s website through metadata, allowing people without subscription access to the journal to find and read your research. This route to open access is cost-free, but embargo periods enforced by publisher agreements (typically ranging from 6 months to two years) can delay when you can make your work openly available. Embargo periods for most journals can be searched on Jisc Open Policy Finder; search by journal name or ISSN and looked at the option(s) for Accepted Version.
How UC Libraries Can Help
UC Libraries supports open access at the University of Cincinnati through a variety of services and programs that are aimed at tackling some of the challenges associated with these open access options.
The library provides article processing charge support in the form of waivers for over 6,400 journals across 13 publishers. (Find an eligible journal through our new Journal Search Tool.) So far in 2026, this program has waived over $1.87 million in APCs across more than 500 articles. To learn more about the impact of this program, visit our Open Access Publishing Support dashboard.
Interested in taking the self-archiving route? UC Libraries hosts the UC institutional repository, Scholar@UC, and can help walk you through the process of depositing in any repository.
Think about open access for our research and join the conversation!