CONFERENCEOpen access to publications means free and unrestricted access to scientific publications online. It means that anyone with an internet connection can read, download, and use research results without financial, legal, or technical barriers. LU offers various opportunities for researchers to publish their work in open access.
Researchers can share their publications through various open access pathways:
- Green Open Access – authors publish their own version of the publication in an institutional repository, in parallel with publication in a traditional subscription journal. This usually does not involve additional costs, as the author publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal and then places a version in the repository.
Depending on the publisher's rules, authors can place one of the following versions in the repository:- preprints: the version of the article before peer review
- postprints: the version of the article after peer review but before final editing
- publisher's version: in some cases, the publisher allows the final, edited version to be posted.
- Gold Open Access – scientific articles are published in journals that provide full open access to all interested parties from the outset. Often, the costs are covered by the author or their institution by paying an Article Processing Charge (APC). This payment covers editorial work, peer review, formatting, and maintenance costs.
There are two types of gold open access journals:- Fully open access journals: all articles published in these journals are freely available
- Hybrid journals: these journals usually publish articles that are available by subscription but offer authors the option of paying an APC to make their article freely available.
- Diamond Open Access – a variant of gold open access, which means that scientific articles are freely available to everyone at no cost, and authors do not have to pay to publish their work.
UL provides the DSpace repository for storing and distributing publications. Publications in the repository are organized by faculty, and it is also possible to upload preprints. All publications receive permanent links (URI) and are indexed in the international systems BASE and OpenDOAR, ensuring the visibility of publications on an international scale.
University of Latvia Academic Publishing publishes several scientific journals without charging authors for publication – in a diamond open access model. These journals provide a high-quality review process and DOI assignment and are freely available to all readers.
Among the UL journals are "Latvijas Universitātes Žurnāls. Vēsture" (Journal of the University of Latvia. History), "Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business", "Journal of the University of Latvia. Law", "Environmental and Experimental Biology", "Baltic Journal of Modern Computing" and others. Several of these journals are indexed in international databases, including the Directory of Open Access Journals, and each article is assigned a DOI identifier.
More information about UL open access publications is available on the UL Academic Publishing website (in Latvian).