Open access journals make peer-reviewed research free for anyone to read, download and build on, with no subscription, paywall or registration in the way. For researchers in computer science and artificial intelligence, where ideas move quickly and code, datasets and papers are reused constantly, open access journals have become one of the most practical ways to share work and be found. This guide explains what open access journals are, how the different models work, what they cost, and how to choose one, including a look at open access journals in AI and where the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) fits.
Key Takeaways
Open access journals are peer reviewed like any other journal. What changes is who pays and who can read: readers pay nothing, and the cost is usually covered up front by the author, a funder or an institution.
Gold open access made up 44% of global articles, reviews and conference papers in 2025, against 50% for subscription-only content (STM Association).
Many open access journals, especially diamond ones, charge authors no fee at all, so "open access" does not automatically mean "pay to publish".
The evidence that open access raises citations is mixed, so choose a journal for its review quality, indexing and reach rather than a promised citation boost.
IJACSA is a gold open access computer science journal, published monthly under a CC BY 4.0 licence, with double-blind peer review.
What Are Open Access Journals?
Open access journals are scholarly journals whose articles are available online immediately on publication, free of charge to the reader, and usually under an open licence that allows reuse with credit to the author. The term was shaped by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 and has since become standard practice in many fields.
Two ideas sit at the heart of every definition. The first is free access: no subscription, no pay-per-view, no login wall. The second is permission to reuse: most open access journals publish under a Creative Commons licence such as CC BY, which lets others copy, share and adapt the work as long as the original is cited.
It helps to be clear about what open access journals are not. They are not a lower tier of publishing, and they are not the same thing as posting a preprint. A preprint is an unreviewed manuscript. An article in an open access journal has gone through the journal's full editorial and peer review process before it is published.
How Open Access Journals Work: Gold, Green, Hybrid and Diamond Models
Open access journals do not all work the same way. The names below describe where the free version lives and who covers the publishing costs.
Model | Where the free version lives | Who usually pays |
|---|---|---|
Gold | The journal's own website, free from day one | Author, funder or institution through an article processing charge (APC) |
Green | A repository, where the author deposits an accepted manuscript | Nobody pays extra; the journal itself may be subscription-based |
Hybrid | A subscription journal that makes individual articles open for a fee | Author, funder or institution, on top of existing subscriptions |
Diamond | The journal's own website, free from day one | A society, university or consortium; neither authors nor readers pay |
Gold is the model most people picture when they talk about open access journals, and it is the one IJACSA uses. Green open access works alongside it, and funders increasingly rely on repository deposit as a route to compliance. Hybrid journals are the subject of growing funder scepticism, which is why Plan S rejects hybrid publishing except under transformative arrangements.
The balance between these routes is shifting. According to the STM Association's Open Access Dashboard, gold open access accounted for 44% of global articles, reviews and conference papers in 2025, up from far lower levels a decade ago, while subscription-only content fell from 66% in 2015 to 50%. Where a gold option was available, authors chose it 52% of the time in 2025, compared with 27% in 2015. A separate dataset built from OpenAlex and published on Zenodo shows the open share of all journal articles climbing from 22% in 2015 to a peak of 59% in 2023; the lower 2024 figure of 47% partly reflects embargo delays, so it should not be read as open access shrinking.
Why Researchers Publish in Open Access Journals
Researchers choose open access journals for four main reasons: reach, reuse, funder requirements and alignment with a wider open science movement.
Reach and discoverability
Anyone with an internet connection can read an article in an open access journal, including practitioners, students, journalists and researchers at institutions that cannot afford large subscription bundles. For applied fields such as computer science, that wider audience often includes the engineers and developers who put research to work.
The citation question, answered honestly
Many articles claim that open access automatically earns more citations. The research is less tidy. A systematic review in PLOS ONE examined 134 studies: 64 reported a citation advantage for open access, 37 found none, 32 found one only in subsets of articles, and one was inconclusive. Only three studies had a low risk of bias, and those three disagreed with each other. The fair reading is that open access is associated with more visibility, but a clean causal citation boost has not been proven, because authors who choose open access may differ in other ways. Treat greater reach as the real benefit and any citation gain as a possible bonus.
Funder and policy requirements
Funding bodies increasingly expect research to be open. Plan S, led by cOAlition S, requires publications from research funded by its members to appear in open access journals or platforms, or to be deposited in a repository with no embargo, normally under a CC BY licence. In the United States, the NIH Public Access Policy took effect on 1 July 2025 and removes embargo periods, requiring accepted manuscripts to be available in PubMed Central on publication. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, adopted in 2021 by 193 member states, sets the same direction at the international level. If your funder has an open access requirement, publishing in open access journals is usually the simplest way to comply.
Are Open Access Journals Peer Reviewed? Quality Versus Myth
Yes. Reputable open access journals use the same peer review process as subscription journals, and the access model has no bearing on how rigorous the review is. Quality depends on the journal's editorial standards, not on how it is funded.
A good open access journal makes its review process visible. IJACSA, for example, publishes under double-blind peer review: reviewers do not see author identities and authors do not see reviewer identities, and each paper is assessed by at least three independent reviewers. Acceptance is granted only when reviewers' recommendations are positive, and the journal's acceptance rate is approximately 15%.
The common myth is that because authors or funders pay a fee, open access journals have an incentive to accept everything. In practice, well-run journals protect their reputation and their indexing status with firm editorial standards, and many open access journals, including diamond ones, charge nothing at all. The right question to ask about any journal is not "is it open access?" but "is its review process transparent and independently checkable?"
How to Choose Trustworthy Open Access Journals
Choosing among open access journals is easier with a checklist. The Think.Check.Submit initiative, backed by organisations including COPE, OASPA, STM and ISSN, suggests asking whether you or your colleagues know the journal, whether the publisher is identifiable, whether peer review is clearly described, whether the journal is indexed in recognised databases, and whether fees are stated openly. Here is a practical version for computer science authors.
Check the publisher's memberships. See whether the publisher belongs to recognised bodies such as COPE or OASPA, and whether that membership is listed on the body's own site rather than only on the journal's.
Verify the indexing claims yourself. Search for the journal on the Scopus source page and in the Web of Science Master Journal List rather than trusting a badge on a homepage. Coverage differs widely: against a reference list of 62,701 open access journals, one 2024 study found Web of Science covered 6,157, Scopus 7,351 and OpenAlex 34,217.
Read the review policy. Look for the review model, the number of reviewers and typical timelines.
Confirm the licence and copyright terms. A clear CC BY statement, and a statement on who holds copyright, should be easy to find.
Find the fees before you submit. The APC, any waivers and the point at which you pay should be stated openly, ideally on a dedicated page.
Look at the editorial board and recent papers. Do the editors have verifiable affiliations, and does the published work match the stated scope?
IJACSA is indexed in Scopus and in the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, along with EI Compendex, Inspec and CrossRef, and each of those listings can be verified on the databases' own sites, which is exactly the habit worth building for any journal you consider.
What Do Open Access Journals Cost? Understanding APCs
Most gold open access journals cover their costs, including editorial management, production, hosting and long-term archiving, through an article processing charge paid on acceptance. The APC is usually paid by the author's institution, a research grant or the author personally, and it varies widely between journals and publishers.
Two facts are worth keeping in mind. First, a fee is not universal: diamond journals and others funded by societies, universities or consortia charge neither authors nor readers. Second, hybrid publishing tends to cost more. A 2026 preprint estimating global APC spending across 14 publishers found that hybrid fees exceed gold fees, and that the fees authors actually pay tend to be higher than published list prices. That preprint has not been peer reviewed, so treat the details as indicative.
Some policies also help with cost. Plan S requires that open access journals offer fee waivers for authors from low-income countries, and many funders and institutions pay APCs directly or through publisher agreements. Before you submit anywhere, ask three questions: what is the fee, who pays it, and when. IJACSA states its fee schedule publicly on its Call for Papers page, with separate rates for standard authors, students and active reviewers, and a secure payment link is sent only after a paper is accepted.
Open Access Journals in Computer Science: Where IJACSA Fits
Computer science has its own publishing habits. Conferences carry high prestige, preprints on arXiv are routine, and journals serve authors who want a fuller, archival version of their work with a stable, citable record. Open access journals suit this culture well, because computing research depends on being read, run and reproduced by others.
The International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) is one example. It has published monthly since 2010 and is fully open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence: all articles are freely and permanently accessible on publication, and authors remain the copyright holders. The journal is indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, and it accepts research, review and survey papers across mainstream branches of computer science and related applications.
For authors, the practical takeaways are concrete: a published review process, a clear licence, named indexing databases and a public fee page. Those are the same signals to look for in any of the open access journals on your shortlist.
Open Access Journals in AI: Why Openness Matters for Artificial Intelligence Research
Artificial intelligence is one of the fastest-moving areas of research, and openness is built into how the field works. According to the Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2025, AI publications grew from about 102,000 in 2013 to more than 242,000 in 2023, and AI's share of all computer science publications rose from 21.6% to 41.8%. With that volume, being easy to find and easy to read is a real advantage for open access journals in AI.
Preprints, open proceedings and journals together
AI researchers typically combine several open channels. arXiv recorded a then-record 24,226 new submissions in October 2024, with computer science the largest category and machine learning, computer vision and computational linguistics among the busiest sub-areas. Major venues also publish openly: the NeurIPS proceedings archive is freely readable online, and the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) makes all its papers freely available. Open access journals add something preprints cannot: formal peer review and a permanent, citable version of record.
Reproducibility and open code and data
Reproducibility is a persistent challenge in machine learning research. A 2025 review in AI Magazine maps the barriers across methods, code, data and experiments, and finds that reproductions often differ substantially from the original results. Open access journals help here because openly licensed papers can be read alongside the shared code and datasets they describe, and readers do not need institutional access to check the claims.
One note of caution: "open access" and "open source" are different things. The AI Index reports that 65.7% of the 149 foundation models released in 2023 were open-source, but that figure describes model releases, not research articles. A paper can be open access while its model is closed, and the reverse is also true, so look at both when judging how open a piece of work really is.
Publishing AI research in IJACSA
IJACSA's scope explicitly covers artificial intelligence alongside the mainstream branches of computer science, so AI and machine learning authors can submit research, review and survey papers to the journal. Because every IJACSA article is open access under CC BY 4.0, the AI work it publishes can be read, cited, reused and built upon without a paywall, which suits a field that advances through shared methods and results.
How to Submit to Open Access Journals Like IJACSA
Submitting to open access journals follows a familiar sequence. The steps below use IJACSA as the worked example, and the IJACSA Call for Papers page has the full details.
Confirm the fit. Read the scope and check that your topic, article type and originality match. IJACSA does not accept manuscripts under review elsewhere or multiple submissions of the same paper.
Prepare your manuscript. Follow the Author Guidelines, and anonymise the manuscript for double-blind review.
Submit online. Use the journal's submission system and complete the author details and ethics declarations.
Go through peer review. Papers are reviewed by at least three independent reviewers, and you will be told the outcome.
Handle the APC after acceptance. If your paper is accepted, you receive a secure payment link on the official thesai.org site, and you then provide the final camera-ready version.
Publish and share. Your article is published open access under CC BY 4.0, ready to be shared, cited and indexed.
Before submitting to any journal, make sure your co-authors, institution and funder agree on the target journal, the licence and who will pay the APC. Sorting that out early avoids delays at the acceptance stage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are open access journals free to publish in?
Not always. Many gold open access journals charge an article processing charge, but many journals charge no APC at all, and funders or institutions often cover the fee where one applies. Always check a journal's fee page before submitting.
Are open access journals peer reviewed?
Reputable open access journals use full peer review, the same as subscription journals. Look for a clearly described review model, such as IJACSA's double-blind process with at least three independent reviewers.
Do open access journals get more citations?
The evidence is mixed. A systematic review of 134 studies found that nearly half reported a citation advantage, but only three had a low risk of bias and they disagreed. Open access reliably increases who can read your work; a citation boost is possible but not guaranteed.
Which open access journals publish artificial intelligence research?
Several journals and venues publish AI work openly, including JMLR and the NeurIPS proceedings. IJACSA also accepts AI and machine learning papers as part of its computer science scope, with every article open access under CC BY 4.0.
What is the difference between gold and green open access?
Gold open access means the final published article is free on the journal's website from day one, usually funded by an APC or a sponsor. Green open access means the author deposits a version of the manuscript in a repository, while the journal itself may still be subscription-based.
Next Steps
Open access journals give your research its widest possible audience, and the best way to use them is to choose deliberately: check the review process, verify the indexing, read the licence and understand the fees before you submit. If your work is in computer science or artificial intelligence, explore the IJACSA journal home page to see recent issues, then read the IJACSA Call for Papers for scope, important dates, fees and how to submit.
Sources and further reading: STM Association, Open Access Dashboard: Uptake of Open Access; Open Access Publishing Patterns 2015-2024 (Zenodo, OpenAlex data); Langham-Putrow et al., PLOS ONE, 2021; cOAlition S, Plan S Principles and Implementation; UCSF Library on the NIH Public Access Policy; UNESCO Open Science; Think.Check.Submit; Geographical and Disciplinary Coverage of Open Access Journals (arXiv); Estimating global article processing charges paid to 14 publishers (arXiv preprint); Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2025; arXiv blog on record monthly submissions; Reproducibility in machine-learning-based research (AI Magazine, 2025).
