Open Access

IOS Press is an active participant in open access publishing initiatives and is closely following and responding to developing trends, funder and institutional mandates, and scholarly publishing reform. In 2023, we transitioned a number of journals from subscription-based to gold open access and launched new open access titles. This will continue in 2024 and beyond.

We accommodate the primary open access models:

Hybrid: Hybrid journals enable authors to choose to publish their individual article as open access within a subscription-based journal. Therefore, the journal is a mixture of open access and closed articles. Authors (or research sponsors) are required to pay an open access fee for the appropriate Creative Commons (CC BY) license.

Gold: In the gold open access model, the publisher makes all articles and related content immediately available for free in perpetuity on the journal’s full text platform. In such publications, articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via Creative Commons (CC BY) licenses.

Subscribe-to-Open (S2O): This is an alternative sustainable subscription model at the journal rather than article level that converts scholarly subscription journals to open access one year at a time. Under this model, institutions continue to subscribe to journals of value to their community. If sufficient threshold subscription revenue (as determined by the publisher) is generated from existing and new subscribers, that entire year's content is published open access, available to all readers globally. Authors are not required to pay APCs.

Green: Self-archiving by authors is permitted under the green open access model, often following an embargo period. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author may also post the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted the work, or an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. This model is free for the author. Refer to our article sharing policy for more information.

Diamond or Platinum: Diamond, also known as Platinum, open access journals are fully open access without charging the authors any Article Publishing Charge (APC), so they are completely free to readers and authors. These journals are supported by funding from external sources such as government grants, scholarly societies, academic institutions, libraries, museums, philanthropic organizations, and advertising sales.

A growing number of funding agencies now require that research articles they fund must be published as open access. This may be either by mandating deposit in repositories after an embargo period or by stipulating that research is published as open access.

Publishing in any of our journals complies with all major funding agency requirements. Authors may self-archive and post the final manuscript version on their own personal website, or that of their institution, company, or funding agency, and/or in an online repository.

Authors who are funded by the National Institutes of Health, Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust and a selection of other funding agencies may deposit their final manuscript version to PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance.

If authors opt for open access and publish in a journal that is included in PubMedCentral, we will deposit the final published version of the article in PubMedCentral on behalf of the authors. Authors may also request that we submit their final published paper for inclusion in PMC even if the journal is not fully indexed in PMC.

We comply fully with the open access requirements of UKRI, Wellcome, and NIHR. All authors retain the right to distribute their author accepted manuscript (AAM), such as via an institutional and/or subject repository (e.g. EuropePMC), under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license for release no later than the date of first online publication.

When posting a manuscript, in all cases the journal’s title, article reference (or DOI), and URL linking to the journal’s full text platform must be provided on the first page of the manuscript.