Frequently Asked Questions About Open Access

The free, immediate, online access, for any user, web‐wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer‐reviewed journals.

The hybrid model is when a journal has a combination of open access and subscription articles. Authors have a choice to pay a fee for the article to be immediately accessible online. The author retains copyright of the article. Open Access articles are subject to the same peer review process as any article within that journal.

The gold model refers to journals that are fully Open Access and no subscription is required to access them. All articles published in one of our gold open access journals are freely available to readers. There is no subscription fee to read and access content and articles are made available under the terms of a Creative Commons license. Most of our gold journals allow the authors to choose one of several CC licenses including CC BY.

Yes, the peer review and production processes are the same for the open access articles in the hybrid model as they are for those articles published and accessible by subscription or pay per view.

All articles undergo the journal’s standard peer review process. Authors are given the option to make an article open access only after the article has been returned for revisions or accepted.

Authors will have the option to publish their paper as open access after the article has been sent back for revisions, and acceptance.

Only the author of the manuscript can request an article to be open access. Funders of the published work may request open access with express written permission from the author.

LWW articles that are open access have the open icon next to them.

Upon submission the author will sign the journal’s standard copyright transfer agreement (CTA). The CTA contains text that states that if the article is accepted, and the author chooses the open access option, the author will be required to sign a License to Publish and upload this form to the journal’s manuscript submission system. The article will then be published under the terms of the Creative Commons License Attribution‐Noncommerical No Derivative 4.0 or for articles funded by recognized funding bodies and institutions, under the terms of the Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license.

Open access articles will be freely available to read, download and share from the time of publication. All open access articles are published under the terms of various Creative Commons 4.0 licenses as defined below:

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND): This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download the works and share it with others as long as they credit the original journal and author, but they can’t change the work in any way or use it commercially.
• Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work noncommercially, as long as they credit the original journal and author and license their new creations under the identical terms.
• Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work noncommercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge the original journal and author and be noncommercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
• Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND): This license allows for redistribution, commercial and noncommercial, of the work as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the original journal and author.
• Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the original journal and author and license their new creations under the identical terms. All new works based on the original will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
• Attribution (CC BY): This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the journal and author for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.

Yes, the Creative Commons license allows this.

Yes. If an author chooses to publish their accepted article as open access, the article is still a part of the regular journal issue and will be included in the same abstracting and indexing services the journal is covered in regularly.

For hybrid open access articles published in journals that are indexed in MEDLINE or who are funded in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health, the final, published version of the article will be deposited into PubMed Central by Wolters Kluwer.

‘Free’ is generic, for any content at no cost, like a website, YouTube videos, free abstracts, or articles that are made free for promotion. Though the content is free to read, reuse and sharing is limited by standard copyright and licensing restrictions that applies to all non-open access content. ‘Open access’ content is free permanently on all online locations and allows users to link, read, download, store, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article without copyright or licensing restrictions. The open access licenses (the Creative Commons licenses detailed above) set some restrictions on commercial and derivative uses of open access content.

A number of research funding agencies now require or request authors to submit the post‐print (the article after peer review and acceptance but not the final published article) to a repository that is accessible online by all without charge. As a service to our authors, LWW identifies to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) articles that require deposit and transmits the post‐print of an article based on research funded in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health to PubMed Central. The revised Copyright Transfer Agreement provides the mechanism. LWW ensures that authors can fully comply with the public access requirements of major funding bodies worldwide. Additionally, all authors who choose the open access option will have their final published article deposited into PubMed Central provided the journal is indexed by MEDLINE.

Yes, Wolters Kluwer hybrid open access program provides authors with a means to comply with open access mandates and meet applicable license requirements. Open access articles will be made available under the terms of the Creative Commons License and the final version of the article will be deposited to PubMed Central on publication provided the journal is indexed in MEDLINE or is funded in whole or in part by the National Institutes of Health.

Authors who would like to make their previously published article open access should contact the journal editorial office for more information.

Yes, open access articles can be published ahead of print.

For any questions, please contact your editorial office or Publisher.

In general, only original research including case reports and reviews will be made open access under this option. Please consult the specific journal’s Instruction for Authors for more information.

View a list of journals that include the hybrid option.

The article processing charge (APC) is a payment that allows the article to be freely available online in perpetuity. The costs cover peer‐review, copy‐editing, hosting, and promotion of the article. An APC can be paid for by the funder, author, institution, or a sponsor. Additional page and color charges apply on some hybrid journals. The article processing charges vary for different titles for a variety of factors such as the size of the journal, volume of submissions, etc. View the complete list of APC charges.

Wolters Kluwer will provide authors with a link and instructions on how to pay via our online payment portal.

Yes, authors can pay by credit card or they can request an invoice to be sent to their institution and third parties. Authors can also forward the payment link we provide to these other parties.

Wolters Kluwer currently has read-and-publish agreements with institutional consortia listed here.

Corresponding authors who are affiliated with the participating institution and who qualify as eligible authors* can publish their articles open access in the eligible LWW journals at no direct cost to them. To qualify for the APC waiver, the corresponding author must provide their participating institution’s name and institutional email address in the journal’s submission system. On acceptance, the corresponding author will be asked to place an open access order in the publisher’s payment portal where they will be able to request the APC be funded in accordance with this agreement. A $0.00 APC will then be applied.

Authors can choose to publish under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) where offered or the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative License (CC BY-NC-ND).

^{*Eligible authors: Corresponding authors who are teaching and research staff employed by or otherwise accredited to one of the participating institutions as well as students enrolled or accredited to one of the institutions and who want to publish open access articles.}