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Edward G. Miner Library

Publishing Guide: Open Access Publishing

What is Open Access

Open Access, according to the Budapest Open Access Initiative is: "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

Assessing OA Journal Quality

Open Access journals make articles freely available online, permitting users to read, redistribute or reuse content. Often the reuse rights are defined through use of Creative Commons Licenses

The following quality indicators are intended to provide guidance in evaluating publication venues or in responding to invitations to serve as an editor or reviewer. No single criterion below indicates whether or not a publication is reputable, but the balance of positive and negative indicators may inform the evaluation. 

Positive Indicators

  • Scope of the journal is well-defined and clearly stated
  • Journal's primary audience is researchers/practitioners
  • Editor, editorial board are recognized experts in the field
  • Journal is affiliated with or sponsored by an established scholarly or academic institution
  • Articles are within the scope of the journal and meet the standards of the discipline
  • Any fees or charges for publishing in the journal are easily found on the journal website and clearly explained
  • Articles have DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)
  • Journal clearly indicates rights for use and re-use of articles at the article level (for instance, Creative Commons license)
  • Journal has ISSN (International Standard Serial Number, such as1234-5678)
  • Journal is included in subject databases or indexes
http://libguides.bc.edu/openaccess/journals

Where to publish

This is a list of some of the more popular Open Access Journals in medicine. 

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): A searchable directory of journals from multiple disciplines that are open access

Public Library of Science (PLoS): PLos publishes several well known and respected open access, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of disciplines in the sciences. 

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.

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 OA Journals:  Open access journals published by Elsevier

SpringerOpen: Open access journals published by Springer

Taylor & Francis OA Journals: Open access journals published by Taylor and Francis.

Wiley Open Access Journals:  Open access journals published by Wiley

New Forms of Publishing

SlideShare – Users can upload presentations in: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument. The number of downloads of your slides can be tracked and used as an alternative measure of research impact.

Speaker Deck – Another option for uploading presentation slides.

ScienceOpen – Submitted research posters receive a DOI, easy to download and share. 

Vimeo – Video sharing website where you can upload a conference presentation (if allowed by the conference) or related videos.

WordPress – Blogging software. Users can set up their own blog and post content online. Researchers can write about their peer-reviewed work.

OA at URMC

OA

Negative Indicators

  • Journal website is difficult to locate or identify
  • Publisher "About" information is absent on the journal's website 
  • A single editor is listed and editorial board information is absent
  • Publisher direct marketing (spamming) or other advertising is obtrusive
  • Instructions for authors are not available
  • Information on peer review and copyright is absent or unclear on the journal website
  • Journal scope statement is absent or extremely vague
  • No information is provided about the publisher, or the information provided does not clearly indicate a relationship to a mission to disseminate research content
  • Repeat lead authors in the same issue
  • Publisher has a negative reputation (documented examples in The Chronicle of Higher Education, list-servs, etc.)
http://libguides.bc.edu/openaccess/journals

Types of Open Access

Green OA: Work deposited into an archive. This could be preprint or post print depending on the publishers terms (ie PubMed Central).

Gold OA: Publishing a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal with open access, sometimes financed through article publication charges.

Hybrid: An option now offered by many traditional publishers where an author can pay a publication fee to make an article open access.

Open Access Article Repositories

arXiv.org -- Open access to over one million academic articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative   Finance and Statistics.

OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories. This directory provides a searchable database of academic open access repositories. Here you can search either for repositories or for repository content.

Open Science – Directory which provides access to over 13000 scientific journals, indexed from DOAJ, eJDS, BioMed Central, HighWire Press and others.

PubMedCentral – Free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)

Open Access Data Repositories

Re3data (Registry of Research Data Repositories) – a global registry of research data repositories.

Figshare – Provides free, unlimited public space to upload files in any format to be visualized in a browser. Share such research products as figures, datasets, posters and presentations.

Dryad – A fee-based data sharing initiative that works with publishers to host research data. 

URRR – the UR Research Repository offers a place for UR faculty, researchers, students, and staff to deposit their research outputs for sharing publicly with the global community.