Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A journal that publishes every accepted article as freely readable from day one, funded entirely through APCs.
- Is an instance
A society-owned journal listed in DOAJ that charges no APC and is subsidised by the society's membership dues.
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.
Open access journals fund themselves through a variety of models: article processing charges (APCs) paid by or on behalf of authors, institutional or society subsidy, advertising, or no-fee arrangements. A journal that is both open access and charges no APC to any party is sometimes distinguished as diamond open access; a fully open-access journal in general is often called a pure gold journal. 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 before an author submits or a funder counts a publication as compliant.
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"
},
"dateModified": "2026-08-17T01:53:58",
"inLanguage": "en"
}
