Open Access (OA) is unrestricted online access to scientific information, allowing research results to be read, downloaded, copied, printed, and—by citing the original source—distributed, reused, and published without fees and access limitations.
Publishing articles in open access may be a requirement of research funders and is part of the evaluation of research outputs. For example, the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects require open access to all scientific publications. Complying with OA requirements ensures that results of publicly funded research projects are accessible to everyone.
For Researchers, there are mainly two options for OA publishing:
Publishing in an OA journal (Gold OA) – a peer-reviewed article is made freely available in an open access scientific journal. Some journals charge authors a fee (Article Processing Charge, APC), others do not. Researchers in European projects can publish for free via the Open Research Europe platform.
You can check journal background and publishing options via:
In certain cases, OA publishing costs are covered under a Transformative Agreement / Pay and Publish model, signed between a publisher and a research institution. These agreements expand access to e-journal collections and include OA publishing options, allowing researchers to publish OA articles for free or at discounted rates.
In Estonia, access to research databases is purchased collectively via the ELNET Consortium, and information about signed transformative agreements can be obtained from research libraries (e.g., University of Tartu Library).
NB! Regardless of the method chosen, best practice requires the researcher to make the article available in a repository.
The version of the article published in a scientific journal is made available and archived in a chosen repository:
As a rule, commercial publishers of scientific journals allow archiving of the manuscript (pre-print, AOM – Author’s Original Manuscript) and/or the peer-reviewed manuscript (post-print, AAM – Author Accepted Manuscript) in parallel with publication in the journal; you just need to check the conditions and consider any possible embargo.
Publisher and funder conditions can be checked via:
Many scientific journals published in Estonia have been open access since the emergence of electronic versions (see DOAJ list). Some Estonian OA journals have defined copyright ownership and license terms, but not all are correctly listed in DOAJ and SHERPA/ROMEO registries.
Guidelines for new and existing OA journals can be found on the Open Access Journals Toolkit website.
Estonian university libraries provide support and help researchers find suitable solutions for meeting OA publishing requirements:
