Gold Open Access
The term gold Open Access applies to a publication that is Open Access available on the publisher's website.
Some publishers will ask a fee for gold Open Access; this can be an APC (Article Processing Charge) or BPC (Book Processing Charge).

If a journal is not fully open, but does offer the opportunity to pay for individual articles to be made open, we sometimes call this hybrid Open Access.

Open Access without any charges whatsoever, is also known as diamont Open Access.

Green Open Access
If a publication is not Open Access available on the publisher's website, an author may take the opportunity to make it open by means of an upload in een trusted repository. We apply the term green Open Access to this procedure for open publishing. Leiden University has its own repository Scholarly Publications.

The Executive Board asks researchers to make their Leiden affiliated publications Open Access by means of an upload into Scholarly Publications. When the publications have already been issued in Open Access by the publisher, you can easily make a straightforward upload. If they are not (yet) Open Access, you can read on our webpage 'Publish Open Access in Scholarly Publications' how you can best proceed.

You can find more information on the page 'Leiden University Open Access Policy'.

Many research funders have requirements regarding Open Access, and at the same time also provide (at least partial) funding for Open Access publication costs. Please take note of their demands and regulations when writing your research proposal. 

• As of 2021 funders such as NWO and ERC apply the so called PlanS principles. Your grant agreement will indicate whether these apply to your project or not. 

The most important funding agencies are listed below:

• NWO
• Horizon 2020
• ERC

It is crucial to budget possible costs for Open Access publishing as early as in your research proposal. 

In this flowchart you will find a step by step explanation on how you can publish your article Open Access. The consortium of university libaries (UKB) provides a useful overview 'how to get to the PDF' to find the articles.

Leiden University has numerous deals with publishers that will offer our corresponding authors Open Access without additional costs and guarantee high quality.

Browse the Journal Browser for the possibilities to publish Open Access listed per journal. If you only wish to see the journals that will allow you to publish without having to pay, you should use the filter in the menu on the left hand side of the Journal Browser.

You can upload your publication via LUCRIS easily into Scholarly Publications and make your research publicly available without any costs. We explain how to proceed on the page 'LUCRIS and Scholarly Publications'.

Many researchers use Creative Commons licenses to share their publications in open access. In this video, Leiden Professor of Intellectual Property Law Dirk Visser explains copyright in relation to Open Access and the various licenses that authors can apply for their users.

Unfortunately, some 'publishers' approach our researchers trying to extract publication fees without providing proper editorial services, the so-called predatory publishers.

In our Blogpost:'Questionable and Predatory journals' you can read how you can recognize and avoid these fake journals.  

The webpages of Think Check Submit also provide some good advice.