Open Access

Open access status is provided across the Web of Science platform as a result of a partnership with OurResearch, a not-for-profit organization that maintains a knowledge base of Open Access (OA) content. This knowledge base makes it possible to discover and link to legal Gold, or Bronze (free content at a publisher's website) and Green (e.g., author self-archived in a repository) OA versions. This partnership improves discoverability and access to article-level OA versions not only by adding more links to OA content, but also by prioritizing the links to the best version of OA content when multiple versions of an article are available. 

Always consult the copyright owner for any re-use or licensing requests.

About the Open Access data source

Open Access classifications in Web of Science and InCites Benchmarking & Analytics are based on OA metadata provided through OurResearch / Unpaywall. As this external OA knowledge base is continuously maintained and improved, OA classifications for some records may change over time to reflect improved source coverage, licensing identification, and repository metadata.

Descriptions of Open Access Types

The following table outlines descriptions of each access type.

Open Access Type	Descriptions		What this means in practice
Gold	Gold	Identified as having a Creative Commons (CC) license by OurResearch Unpaywall Database. All articles in these journals must have a license in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative to be called Gold.	The article is published in a fully open journal.
	Hybrid	Items identified as having a Creative Commons (CC) license by OurResearch but that are not in journals where all content is Gold. Hybrid Gold open access status is at varying levels of completeness, especially for newly published articles.	The journal is subscription-based, but the individual article has been made open access.
Free to Read	The licensing for these articles is either unclear or identified by OurResearch as non-CC license articles. These are free-to-read or public access articles located on a publisher’s site.  A publisher may, as a promotion, grant free access to an article for a limited time. At the end of the promotional period, access to the article may require a fee which can lead to temporary errors in our data. You may find content that is incomplete, especially new content.		The article can be read without a paywall, but reuse rights may be limited or unclear.
Green	Published	Final published versions of articles hosted on an institutional or subject-based repository (e.g., an article out of its embargo period posted to PubMed Central).	The publisher-formatted final version is openly available in a repository.
	Accepted	Accepted manuscripts hosted on a repository. Content is peer reviewed and final, but may not have been through the publisher’s copy-editing or typesetting.	A peer-reviewed accepted manuscript is openly available in a repository, but it may not match the final published layout.
	Submitted	Original manuscripts submitted for publication, but that have not been through a peer review process.	A submitted version of the manuscript is openly available in a repository before peer review.

For Web of Science specific functionality such as refining results and exporting Open Access data, see the Web of Science help article: Open Access – Web of Science.