Scholarly Communications

There are more opportunities than ever to publish in Open Access journals. It is an easy way to make your work open, though there are potential drawbacks, especially in terms of potential costs. 

Benefits of Publishing in OA Journals

• Publishing with an OA journal ensures the version of record of the article is immediately made open upon publication. 
• No work is required of you to make your article OA other than submitting it to the journal.
• Publishing Open Access in hybrid journals can mix the benefits of Open Access publishing with that of publishing in a traditional journal. 

Potential Downsides of Publishing in OA Journals

• Fully OA journals might not be the most impactful in your field of study. 
• Some OA journals require APCs to publish, especially hybrid journals, which can get expensive.

PLOS Open Access logo is decided into the public domain using a CC0 dedication. 

Read and publish agreements, also called transformative agreements, are contracts signed between a library and publishers designed to support Open Access journal publishing. Besides access to subscription journals, the agreements also allows researchers at the library's institution to publish Open Access in the publisher's journals without paying article processing charges (APCs). 

The University Libraries currently has an active transformative agreement with Springer Nature. See the journal list below.

• More and more journals are publishing OA every year.
• As seen by the number of journal-OA models, there is a lot to consider when choosing an OA journal. 
• The Directory of Open Access Journals can help you sort through all of these issues and identify where to submit your research. 

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

• The DOAJ lets you search over 16,500 peer-reviewed global OA journals covering all academic disciplines.
• The DOAJ will include any journal that meets its inclusion guidelines, which include that the publication is a research journal, that it is peer reviewed, that it is Open Access, and that it is actively publishing.
• It will also certify journals that meet its standards for best practices in OA publishing with the DOAJ Seal. These standards include preservation of the journal's contents, data quality, use and display of open licenses, preservation of author's rights, and permissions to self-archive.

Search the DOAJ

1. Start by keyword searching for a journal. The search will look at a journal's title, ISSN, subject, or publisher, and you can limit your result to any one of these.
   
2. The results page will display a list of journals with condensed information about each result. You can limit to journals with the DOAJ seal or those without APCs as well as by subject, language, license, publisher, publisher's country, type of peer review, and year added to the DOAJ.
   
3. Clicking a result title will take you to its record page. The record page is organized into multiple sections to help you quickly find information.
   1. Top the page: journal name, ISSN, and links to its website and ISSN portal
   2. Publishing With This Journal
      1. Whether the journal charges APCS, estimates, and whether they provide waivers
      2. Links to the journal's scope and editorial policies
      3. Estimated publication time frame
   3. Best Practices
      1. Open licenses used
      2. Author rights policies
      3. Digital preservation policies
      4. Self-archiving policies
      5. Permanent identifiers used
   4. Journal Metadata
      1. Publisher
      2. Language of publication
      3. Subjects covered by the journal