Open Access Roads
There are several ways to make a publication freely accessible, often illustrated as roads or paths.
Gold Road
The Gold Road consists of publishing the results of one's research in an Open Access journal or in an Open Access book. Access to the document is immediate and free for all on the publisher's website.
The author is sometimes charged publication fees (Article Processing charges or APC; Book processing charges or BPC), which can often be covered by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), or even by the UNIGE's publication fund under certain conditions.
100% Open Access journals are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and books in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).
Diamond road
The Diamond Road (also known as Platinum) is a variant of the gold road where authors are not charged for any publication fees. Neither the authors, nor the readers pay anything.
Green Road
The Green Road consists of depositing a copyright-free version of a publication (often the accepted version) in an archive such as Archive ouverte UNIGE, even if the published version is not available free of charge on the publisher's website.
Open policy finder (formerly known as Sherpa Romeo) can in most cases determine whether a publisher imposes an embargo and/or restrictions on the version of the article that can be disseminated.
The Rights Retention Strategy allows you to retain the right to freely and immediately disseminate a copy of the scientific article (without embargo).
Sharing in Archive ouverte UNIGE must also be done for articles published with the gold road or the hybrid model.
hybrid Model
The hybrid model consists of publishing one's article in a subscription journal and paying an additional fee to make the article available in Open Access.
The risk with this model is that the publisher of the journal receives a double remuneration (subscription + APC). For this reason in particular, neither the SNSF nor the publication fund will provide financial support for publication costs in such subscription-based journals.
However, in the framework of Read&Publish agreements negotiated with certain publishers, journal subscriptions taken out by the Library include quota of articles that the institution's authors can publish in Open Access at no extra cost with these publishers.