Delayed open-access journal

Open Access is free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research journal articles . Delayed access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the elapse of an embargo period following the initial publication date (with the embargo length varying from a few months to two or more years) ,. A journal subscription or an individual article purchase fee would be required to access the materials before this embargo period ends. Some delayed access journals also deposit their publications in open repositories when the author is bound by an (immediate or delayed) open access mandate.

Many scholarly society journals have adopted the delayed access model. Delayed access does increase access to scholarly research literature for many, but subscribing institutions continue to pay for immediate access during the embargo period. The wide range in embargo lengths – and the fact that open access is both defined and intended as the state of immediate access – limits the meaningfulness of classifying journals as "delayed open access" journals. For example, Molecular Biology of the Cell has a one-month embargo, whereas Journal of the Physical Society of Japan has a 15-year embargo period. Hence such journals are not included in the lists of open access journals, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). In some cases, the free access to back issues of the journal is provided as a courtesy by the publisher; in other cases it follows from a legal agreement between the publishers and the authors, or their institutions, as in the case of a delayed open access mandate.

The rationale for the access delay is to provide eventual access to all would-be users while still requiring the institutions of researchers who need immediate access to keep paying the subscriptions that cover the costs of publication. The marginal costs of distributing an electronic journal to additional users are trivial in comparison to distributing printed copies of the publication. Delayed access publishers will spend little or no additional funds while marketing their publications to a broader population than those with personal subscriptions or those affiliated with institutions that have institutional subscriptions or other forms of institutional access. The assumption is that students and others affiliated with smaller non-research institutions do not generally need to see the article as quickly as researchers, that researchers all have sufficient institutional subscription of license access, and that researchers at institution that cannot afford subscriptions to a journal can use interlibrary loan or direct purchases to access articles needed for their research.

As a remedy for the fact that in the online era immediate access to research continues to be denied to those who need it most (researchers) if their institutions cannot afford to pay for it, researchers do have the option of providing open access to their own published research immediately, by self-archiving it in their institutional repositories. A growing number of research institutions and research funders worldwide are now beginning adopt open access mandates to ensure that their researchers self-archive.

See also

• List of open-access journals
• Hybrid open access journal
• Open access journal
• Self-archiving