Lane Medical Library

Deciding Where to Publish

Being informed about the complex and ever evolving publishing process is necessary for scholars to retain control over their work. Traditional publishing models may require the signing over of author’s rights to the publisher. Authors could lose the right to use their work in future research, share work freely with others, self-archive work, or post it to their personal website. It is important to consider the accessibility of your works when deciding on where to publish.

One way to identify and choose a journal (or alternative publication format) in which to publish is to review journal metrics. Journal metrics are tabulated using a variety of complex algorithms based on citations per article over time. Therefore, a very reputable journal that has only been recently established might not have a high metrics score. The same is true for many open access journal titles who have only been around since the late 1990s to early 2010s. Below is a list of journal metrics and the directory of open access journals to assist authors in making submission decisions. (Amended from University of Guelph Library Publishing Support)

Open Access

"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do — accelerate research."

— from SPARC

"Authors can choose to publish their research articles in a growing number of journals that meet the full definition of Open Access. Articles are free to all interested readers, and the publisher places no nancial or copyright barriers between the readers and the article. Open Access publishing is the fastest growing segment of the scholarly publishing market, and journal options are now available for nearly every area of research."

— from SPARC OA Handout

SHERPA/RoMEO

SHERPA RoMEO is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis. RoMEO is a Jisc service and has collaborative relationships with many international partners, who contribute time and effort to developing and maintaining the service.

In the News

• "New web services that help authors choose journals", August 3, 2017
• Early "Career Researchers as key partners for dislodging legacy publishing models", September 15, 2017
• "A bold open-access push in Germany could change the future of academic publishing", August 23, 2017
• "Should open access and open data come with open ethics?" July 20, 2017

Author Rights

The Stanford Libraries has a section on author rights in the publishing process and implications on copyright. They suggest authors refer to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education. The following are a list of helpful sites from SPARC which provide information about retaining authors rights and ensuring compliance with public access policy publisher and/or funder guidelines:

• Publishing Introduction to Copyright Resources for Authors (from SPARC)
• Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum
  Be a responsible steward of your intellectual property. Retain vital rights for you and your readers while authorizing publishing activities that benefit everyone by making scholarship more widely available.
• The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles.

Public Access Policy Compliance

National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests inserting the following language into the publisher’s agreement:

"Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript to the NIH upon acceptance for Journal publication, for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible but no later than 12 months after publication by Journal.”

National Science Foundation (NSF) requires principal investigators who publish peer-reviewed journal articles or juried conference papers to deposit a copy of the item (either the final accepted version or the version of record, as defined in NSF's public access plan) in the NSF public access repository hosted by the Department of Energy (DOE).

NSF allows an embargo or administrative delay for access of up to 12 months from the date of publication for journal articles or juried conference papers. Individual journal titles (or proceedings or transactions) may institute shorter periods. If a publisher's embargo exceeds 12 months, NSF will make available the version deposited in the NSF public access repository.

• NSF Public Access Policy FAQs

Tools

• Open Access Spectrum Evaluation Tool quantitatively scores journals' degrees of openness.