What is Open Access?

Open Access to peer-reviewed journal articles (and other information and data on invasive species) means their free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Open Access (OA) policy of INVASIVESNET journals means that authors retain the copyright of their articles, which can be copied, downloaded and freely distributed within society. The primary advantage of INVASIVESNET journals is that the entire content is freely available to users everywhere, and this may enhance citation rates of OA papers..

At this stage INVASIVESNET journals apply a regular funding model for OA journals, by charging authors a minimum possible fee for processing of their manuscripts. Currently INVASIVESNET is seeking funding from relevant organizations in order to support publications by students, retired scientists, those from low income countries and other scientists who have no institutional or grant support for publishing their research in OA journals. In the long-term, INVASIVESNET will develop a relevant funding infra-structure to support open access publications on invasive species in INVASIVESNET journals, which will greatly facilitate OA publications by scientists and other data holders. Also, INVASIVESNET will work with commercial publishers to encourage free access of all IAS-related research and data published in their journals and books.

Please see more information on Open Access, advantages of OA journals and their funding models at Budapest Open Access Initiative, Wikipedia and Nordic Open Access Publishing web sites, and in recent publications:

Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, et al. (2010) Self-selected or mandated, Open Access increases citation impact for higher quality research. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636

Piwowar HA, Vision TJ (2013) Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ 1: e175. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175

Ottaviani J (2016) The post-embargo Open Access citation advantage: it exists (probably), it’s modest (usually), and the rich get richer (of course). PLoS ONE 11(8): e0159614. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0159614

Tennant JP, Waldner F, Jacques DC et al. (2016) The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review. F1000Research 5: 632. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.8460.1