Gold Open Access (GOA) refers to open access publications that are funded from any number of business models whereas hybrid open access articles are open access articles that appear in fee-based or commercial journals. Gold OA journals may be financially under-written by grant funding, a research institute, or via article processing charges (APC) paid by authors and the entire publication is made readily available as open access content.
Business models for Gold OA journals vary:
- BioMedCentral (BMC): where an institution can choose to pay a set amount annually to allow for the publication of articles from their local faculty.
- PEERJ: where an institution pays a one-time fee for authors to publish at a discounted APC cost.
- In some cases, advertising revenues are used to off-set author fees.
- Many Gold OA journals do not charge any APCs at all.
Hybrid OA occurs in commercially produced publications that are primarily supported by subscription costs paid for by institutions of higher learning or by individual subscribers where there is also an option for an author/funder to pay article process charges in order to make their individual article open access. The majority of each issue in a hybrid publication is generally expected to be behind a paywall of some sort. There are some variations on the hybrid model, where society publishers will make articles written by their members open access but all other published authors are behind paywalls. This is an attempt to retain and encourage membership within the given society. Hybrid OA publishing has grown tremendously in the past three years and more and more commercial publishers are allowing for articles within their subscription journals to be published open access.
2.1 The ‘traditional’ green model
2.3 Funder mandates/policies for green and gold
2.4 The effect of gold on workflows and staffing
2.5 Pure gold vs. hybrid journals
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