In traditional scholarly publishing, journals keep articles behind paywalls. Advocates for Open Access want to restructure the scholarly publishing system to remove those paywalls. In "Gold Open Access," articles are published online with no cost. In "Green Open Access," the publisher's official version is kept behind a paywall, but the author is given permission to post their own version on their website or in an institutional repository. Often, articles posted by authors are "postprints," which do include the revisions from the peer review process but do not include the publisher's final pagination.
As stated by the Association of College and Research Libraries:
"Libraries and the faculty and institutions they serve are participants in the unusual business model that funds traditional scholarly publishing. Faculty produce and edit, typically without any direct financial advantage, the content that publishers then evaluate, assemble, publish and distribute. The colleges and universities that employ these faculty authors/editors then purchase, through their libraries, that packaged content back at exorbitant prices for use by those same faculty and their students. This unusual business model where the 'necessary inputs' are provided free of cost to publishers who then in return sell that 'input' back to the institutions that pay the salaries of the persons producing it has given rise to an unsustainable system begging for transformation.
The subscription prices charged to institutions has far outpaced the budgets of the institutions' libraries who are responsible for paying those bills. Years of stagnant university funding and the economic downturn rendered many library budgets flat, while journal pricing continued to rise. This problem became known as the 'serials crisis.'"
Many Open Access journals are high-quality. They have an extensive editorial process and peer review. However, low-quality, predatory, and "fake" Open Access journals do exist. "Fake" journals do not employ sufficient scrutiny. Visit "Think. Check. Submit." for more information about evaluating the quality of journals, conferences, and publishers.