Open Access Journals

Open Access journals are, to their users, very similar to many traditionally-published journals. Like many traditionally published journals, they are accessible through a publisher's website, employ peer review to maintain the quality of article content and many are indexed in MEDLINE and Scopus. The main difference is that since these journals are not paid for by library or personal subscriptions, other models are used to offset the costs of journal production.

Many open access journal publishers use the "author pays" model, where the author of an article pays the costs for the article's editing and distribution. A variation of this is an "institutional membership", where the author's institution (or, in some cases, institutional library), pays a membership fee annually. All authors from the member institution get their fees for accepted articles either waived or reduced.

Himmelfarb Library is an institutional member of two open access publishers: Public Library of Science (PLoS) and BioMed Central. GW authors pay a reduced fee to be published in the seven PLoS and 220 BioMed Central journals, which cover many specialties in medicine, public health and nursing.

For more examples, consult the Directory of Open Access Journals, which provides a thorough list of peer reviewed open access journals.

Embargoed Journals

An "embargo" is a designated period of time during which a publisher will not make the journal's articles freely available. Embargoes may be as short as one month or longer than two years. Once the embargo period has passed, the articles from these traditional journals may then be freely accessed like other open access journals.

Some Open Access titles may be journal titles from the more traditional publishing model-titles for which the publisher has decided to make the electronic copy of the journal articles freely available. However, since the perceived value of electronic journals has increased this practice is less common. More common is this use of an "embargo" period for traditionally-published titles.