Open Access Publisher

Since the dawn of the 21st century, there has been a considerable increase in the number of Open Access Publishers. These publishers provide an opportunity to scientists and academicians to publish their research findings in the form of open access manuscripts that are hosted by open access journals of their respective fields.

Open Access journal publishers can be classified into three major types; born Open Access publishers, conventional publishers, and non-traditional publishers. Born-OA Publishers such as PLoS One are commercial or non-profit publishers, established for the sole purpose of publishing Open Access journals. Thesejournals make use of the Creative Commons Attribution License for their publications. Authors usually retain their copyrights and users are needed to acknowledge and cite the authors in future references.

Conventional Publishers like SpringerLink are originally conventional commercial and non-profit journal publishers who began to experiment with Open Access publishing programs. The articles are published in both print and digital form. A license is used that is similar to the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.

Non-Traditional Publishers such as EJournal and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review are no-profit journals developed by scholars who began to publish free digital journals using existing institutional infrastructure. While some of these journals discontinued publication and others were altered into non-profit enterprises, they provided a model for other Open Access publishers, especially with the advent of internet age.