Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A journal that publishes every accepted article as freely readable from day one, funded entirely through article processing charges (APCs).
- Is an instance
A society-owned journal listed in DOAJ that charges no APC to any party and is subsidised entirely by the society's membership dues -- a diamond open access journal.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A subscription journal that lets individual authors pay to unlock their own article is a hybrid journal, not an open access journal, because most of its content remains paywalled.
Editorial commentary
An open access journal makes every article it publishes freely available online at the point of publication, without a subscription, paywall, or login requirement. This is a property of the journal as a whole, not of individual articles within it: every article that appears in an open access journal is open access, which is what separates it from a hybrid journal, where open access is optional and paid for article by article, leaving most of the issue behind a paywall.
How open access journals fund themselves
Open access journals use a variety of funding models: article processing charges (APCs) paid by or on behalf of authors, institutional or society subsidy, advertising, or no-fee arrangements funded through other means entirely. A journal that is both open access and charges no APC to any party is distinguished as diamond open access; a fully open-access journal in general, regardless of funding model, is often called a pure gold journal, to distinguish the journal-level “gold” route from the author-level “green” route of self-archiving in a repository.
Verifying a title is genuinely open access
DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals, is the standard community-curated index used to confirm that a given title genuinely meets open-access and peer-review criteria, rather than merely claiming to, before an author submits or a funder counts a publication toward an open-access compliance requirement such as Plan S. This distinction matters in practice: many funder open-access mandates specifically require deposit in, or publication by, a DOAJ-listed or otherwise verified venue, precisely because “open access” as a self-description is not independently checked at the point a journal is created.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Open access journal"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-access-journal" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-access-journal",
"name": "Open access journal",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-access-journal",
"description": "A journal that makes its articles immediately available online to the reader without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. All the articles in the journal are available open access.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/knowledge-equity#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/open-access-journal",
"sameAs": [],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:12:23",
"dateModified": "2026-08-23T05:33:44",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
