Where to Publish Your Research: Publishing Open Access

Open Access (OA) is a model of publishing that allows unrestricted online access to scholarly journal articles.

Traditional, subcription-based publishing relies on university libraries to pay for access to journals. Only enrolled students and faculty can access the content of these journals. The cost of publishing is covered by the subscriptions.

An Article Processing Charge (or APC) is the fee to publish in some open access journals. (Not all open access journals or publishers charge a fee to publish an article.)

How much are APCs? An example

Data sharing is increasingly important in research and now often mandated by funding agencies.  There are many discpline-specific data repositories, many of which are open access.  Here are some resources for finding open access repositories in which to deposit your datasets:

• re3data is a global list of data repositories.            
• Dryad is a data-sharing intitive that partners with publishers to host research data underlying scientific and medical publications.

Pros

• Anyone can read your work for free. You can read other open access work for free.
• Anyone can discover your work by using a search engine. Search engines index open access work.
• You keep your copyright, which means you can post your work anywhere and share it with anyone.
• Traditional subcription-based publishing is not accessible to anyone outside of a university or corporate setting. The cost to read a single article is cost prohibitive to individual scholars, universities in developing nations, and the public. The cost barriers to access keep non-open access hidden.

 Cons

• Some journals charge Article Processing Charges, which can be thousands of dollars per article.
• Predatory journals use the open access model to prey on authors. These journals do not provide editorial services, peer review, or indexing services. Publication in a predatory  journal may damage your reputation. Predatory journals use direct email spam techniques to target early career faculty by offering quick publication. They charge Article Processing Charges (APCs), but do not provide any services for them besides online publication (no review, no editing, no indexing). It is important that you verify that your open access publisher is legitimate before submission.
• Tenure and promotion committees often favor journals published under the traditional subscription model
• People erroneously believe open access publications do not receive peer review.

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

  This is a searchable directory of open access journals across all disciplines.

• Public Library of Science (PLoS)

  PLoS publishes several well-established open access, peer-reviewed journals covering an array of disciplines in the sciences including PLOS Biology, PLOS One, and PLOS Pathogens.

• BioMed Central

  BioMed Central Ltd., an independent publisher in London, England, provides free access to biomedical research publications. These publications include biology and medicine journal articles, current reports, and meeting abstracts. BioMed Central offers information about current controlled trials, as well as topics in modern biology.

• International Association for Media and Communication Research OA journal list

  This website lists open access journals in the field of media and communications research.

• PeerJ

  An off-shoot of PLoS, PeerJ is a new open access journal in the biological and medical sciences. PeerJ operates under a unique publishing fee model, which includes lifetime membership options.

• Elsevier's OA Journals

  Elsevier publishes many journals and scholarly works in various disciplines. This site provides a list of this publisher's open access journals.

• SpringerOpen

  This is a list of open access journals published by Springer covering numerous disciplines and subject areas.

• Taylor & Francis OA Journals

  Taylor & Francis publishes many journals and scholarly works in various disciplines. This site provides a list of this publisher's open access journals.

• Wiley Open Access

  Wiley publishes many journals and scholarly works in various disciplines. This site provides a list of this publisher's open access journals.

• Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology

  Two of the Royal Society's journals are fully open access.

• Open Humanities Press

  An "international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide." The OHP network includes several openly accessible book series published by Michigan Publishing at the University of Michigan, as well as a selective list of autonomously-produced open access journals in critical and cultural theory.

• Open Library of Humanities

• A high-profile initiative to establish a non-profit open access publisher for the humanities and social sciences. 

Gold OA is where an entire journal is open access. Rather than the traditional subscription-based publishing model, the journal funds its operations using Article Processing Charges paid for by the authors.

Hybrid OA is where a journal that uses the traditional subscription-based publishing model allows authors the option to publish their article OA. The OA article will be marked open access but the rest of the journal articles will be behind a paywall. Publishing is paid for by Article Processing Charges, and the individual articles are free to the public. The author may or may not retain the copyright under Hybrid OA.

Green OA The publisher, who owns the copyright, may allow the author the right to self-archive on a personal website, an institutional repository, or a third-party repository, like ResearchGate or Academia.edu.

Open Access Repostitories

Depositing your work in an open access repository is another way to share your research.  Be careful to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions when uploading your published work .

• arXiv.org

  Created by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico and launched in 1991, arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers. Areas covered include physics and related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational linguistics, and neuroscience.

• PubMed Central

  PubMed Central is a full-text, open access database (to be distinguished from PubMed which is a citation database) administered by the National Library of Medicine. Depending on publishers' policies, authors can submit published articles for inclusion and are required to do so in the case of NIH-funded research.

• OpenDOAR

  Directory of Open Access Repositories. This directory provides a searchable database of academic open access repositories. Search either for repositories or for repository content.

• Cogprints

  Cogprints is an open access repository for literature in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science and numerous other scientific disciplines. Authors can submit preprints or other published works.

• BioRxiv

  Modeled after ArXiv, the well-known physics pre-print repository, this brand new disciplinary repository operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is a pre-print archive for the biological sciences. Submissions should be made indirectly via exports from institutional repositories like eCommons.