Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Open access (OA) is criminology's future.It makes our field more scientific, impactful, and equitable.Any output can be OA: articles and books, data and code, syllabi and lectures, basically anything that's worth publishing ("making public").This is why I consider open science and open educational resources to be subareas of OA.But I want to keep things short and simple in this essay, so I focus on OA to journal articles.The ideas are somewhat applicable to other outputs, but let's leave the nuances aside.My goal is to help you contribute to open criminology as an author.It's useful to know the types of OA.The first section illustrates them by walking you through what could happen as an author of Criminology or Criminology & Public Policy.They're owned by the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and published by Wiley.In the second section, I explain what makes each type of OA better or worse.This segues into a discussion of embargo problems and how to avoid them.I conclude with a summary and recommendations for how to provide OA to your papers. OA and its typesImagine you're the author of an article in Criminology or Criminology & Public Policy.After the Proofs stage, Wiley uploads the article to its website.This is the "version of record" (VOR).You expect it to be paywalledor "closed access"-because this is the default at these outlets.They're "hybrid journals," as are most criminology journals (Ashby 2021), meaning they're closed access unless someone pays for OA.To your pleasant surprise, it turns out Wiley made your article "Free to read."This is referred to as "bronze OA," but it's not really OA.Think of it as "quasi access," as in not fully open or closed.For clarity hereforth, I'll drop the "OA" label and instead use "bronze access."
Author: Scott Jacques
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4410202019