Nowadays, traditional print publishing is just one way among others of disseminating research (green route, gold route, open access publishers, data warehouses, etc.), most of which offer greater visibility and provide peer appraisal. Increasingly, data is associated to a publication for validating and reproducing findings.
The increasing number of ways of disseminating outputs can make it hard to decide what route to take. There are tools for identifying predatory publishers and assessing the interest of a journal in a given discipline. The dispersal and interconnection of websites means it is crucial to use identifiers enabling researchers to establish unequivocal authorship of their output.
The different publications routes
There are several routes for open access dissemination of research: the green route, the gold route, the diamond route, and overlay journals. Depending on the type of document, peer-review requirements, and the funding-imposed timeframe for placing output online, the author will have to select one of the existing dissemination routes :
- Green open access (or self-archiving) consists in depositing works, whether or not published by traditional means, in an open archive. This increases visibility and citations, while guaranteeing authorship. It is possible to apply a Creative Commons licence to the deposited documents, stating for example that all commercial use is forbidden. Université Rennes 2 recommends using the HAL open archive: https://hal.univ-rennes2.fr/, which provides permanent archiving of publications.
- Gold open access is for articles natively published in open access following a “classical” peer-review publishing process.
- Diamond open access is the model recommended by the European Plan S and the French National Open Science Plan. Articles are accessible to any Internet user without the author paying any fees. Publishers are financed by donations or by selling additional services, especially to libraries, using a freemium model (with the article in open access but paid access to the pdf or data). It is thus a virtuous model: all researchers may publish without any financial obstacles. The “diamond” model is one of the economic publishing models supported by the French Higher Education and Research Ministry, under axis 1 of the second national open science plan, and since March 2022 has benefitted from a “diamond” open access action plan.
- Overlay journals: this is a new publishing model based on open archives; preprints are deposited (in HAL, for example), then selected, peer-reviewed, and assembled to form a virtual journal.