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Open access

All the Rovedar journals are Gold Open Access which provides immediate open access to the content (articles) published in the journal, on the principle that making research freely available on the Internet to support a greater global exchange of knowledge.

How does the process work?

If you aim to publish your work via the gold open-access option, you are welcome to submit your article to the Rovedar journal of your choice in the normal way. When your article has been accepted for publication, It will be published online.


What is my Open Access Licence?

Articles in Rovedar journals are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

According to the Creative Commons website: “This license CC BY, lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.” Authors who publish in this journal retain the copyright to their work and grant the journal the right of first publication. Additionally, the work is simultaneously licensed under a CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, share, distribution, and reproduction in any platform and medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA), simply means publications are freely available online to all at no cost and with limited restrictions with regard to reuse.

It is definitely not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which they hope to earn royalty payments. It concerns the outputs that scholars normally give away free to be published – peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and datasets of various kinds.”

The unrestricted distribution of study results is especially important for authors (as their work gets seen by more people), readers (as they can access and build on the most recent work in the field), and funders (as the work they fund has broader impact by being able to reach a wider audience).

An overview of full OA journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The formal definitions of Open Access are Bethesda (2003), and Berlin (2003) definitions and they are usually referred to as a consolidated ‘BBB definition‘.

There are two forms of open access: Gold OA and Green OA

Gold OA makes a published work freely and permanently accessible for everyone, immediately after copyright and permission is retained by the authors. Both Fully OA and hybrid (subscription-based journal) journals publish articles per Gold OA which allows the re-use of the work as long as the authors are acknowledged and cited as they retain the copyright.

Green OA, also referred to as self-archiving, is the practice of placing a version of an author’s manuscript into a repository, making it freely accessible for everyone. The version that can be deposited into a repository is dependent on the funder or publisher. Unlike Gold OA the copyright for these articles usually sits with the publisher of, or the society affiliated with, the title and there are restrictions as to how the work can be reused. There are individual self-archiving policies by journal or publisher that determine the terms and conditions e.g. which article version may be used and when the article can be made openly accessible in the repository (also called an embargo period).


Benefits of Gold Open Access

  • Greater visibility and impact: A broader distribution and increased visibility and citation of articles when are freely and permanently available online immediately upon publication than subscription content (restricted access);
  • Content published under a Creative Commons license can be archived anywhere and allow authors to easily comply with funder requirements;
  • Retention of copyright by authors;
  • Moves research along faster and the paper can be carried out and published quicker. This is especially important in time-sensitive fields and topics (e.g. COVID-19 pandemic);
  • Greater public engagement especially when content affects the general public (e.g. patient groups);
  • Better management and assessment of research
  • Provides the material on which the new semantic web tools for data-mining and text-mining can work, generating new knowledge from existing findings;
  • Incorporates local research into an interoperable network of global knowledge;
  • Increases impact of local research, providing new contacts and research partnerships for authors;
  • Removes professional isolation;
  • And can support the development of indigenous and science-based knowledge