Types of Open Access Publishing
OA repositories do not conduct peer review; they simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Authors may archive their preprints without anyone else’s permission, and a majority of journals already permit authors to archive their postprints.
As of January 2026, most grant funders, such as NIH, require you to publicly share the accepted manuscript of your research (the version after peer review but before final formatting). Usually, this entails depositing or posting the accepted manuscript in a repository, such as arXiv or SBU Libraries Academic Commons. This is called green open access.
Making the fully edited, published article (also called the version of record) publicly available is gold open access.
Article Processing Fees (APCs)
OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society. Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, to be paid by the author or the author’s sponsor (e.g., employer or funding agency).
OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional subsidies tend to charge no processing fees.
SBU Libraries does not provide any funds for APCs. However, the publisher Elsevier provides a 10% discount on APCs for all SBU (and SUNY) authors who wish to publish open access in Elsevier journals at this time, until further notice.