There are varieties of Open Access, although, a true Open Access (OA) publication is freely available immediately upon publication for reading and reuse. A consistent area of confusion for scholars is the conflation of journal quality with the business model of a publication. An author can choose to publish wherever they like and still have the potential to make their work open access by depositing a version of the work in a repository. Alternatively, an author could publish in a journal that operates under a fully OA model (where all works are OA) or a hybrid journal model - where both subscription fees and OA fees (article processing charges) are collected and not all works are OA.
The resources given in this section can help authors understand the differences between types of open access.
ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit
Scholarly Communication: University of California + Berkeley & Reshaping Scholarly Communication
Scholarly Communication Program: Columbia University
Scholarly Publishing @ MIT Libraries
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University Libraries - Scholarly Communication
Transforming Scholarly Communication: University of Minnesota Libraries
Winning Independence: Penn State Libraries