Want to achieve a high impact with your research? Publish it in open access journals! Learn what is open access and what types of journals are available.
Once you immerse in writing academic papers and get some of your papers through the peer-review process, you’ll realise that there are several options for you to enable others to access publication that you crafted. By the way, here’s my article on how you can avoid key mistakes in academic writing.
Some of these options are paid, some are free, but the underlying idea of publishing in an open-access peer-reviewed journal is to share your research with a wide academic community. After all, we publish our work for others to learn what we did and found out, as well as to disseminate the new knowledge produced in high-quality research.
There is a strong open access movement that promotes making your research as widely available as possible. And I strongly support this. We’re not producing our cutting-edge research for the publishers to benefit. We’re producing it to advance our knowledge and make our life better!
When I engage with early career researchers and PhDs, I noted that open access is not very well understood across academic disciplines. Unfortunately, this lack of understanding makes those with little experience in academic publishing vulnerable to predatory journals or journals that don’t care about quality or ethical issues.
In this article, I want to encourage you to make your research papers and review papers as widely available as possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re in social sciences, health sciences, behavioral sciences, medicine sustainable development, energy science or engineering, or climate research areas. Making your original articles openly accessible will help other researchers, professionals and policymakers in your field find and use your work!
What is open access?
As already explained in the name, open access journals make your high-quality research openly available to all at no cost to the reader.
According to openaccess.nl “a publication is defined ‘open access’ when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it – that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.”
The most important benefits of publishing in OA journals is that your work is more visible and easier to reuse by others.
The disadvantage? Most of the OA journals charge the article processing charges (APC) that can reach a couple of thousands dollars/euro/pounds for the top journals in your field. This is usually paid by the author’s institution through grants or agreements with publishers.
That’s where the open access publishing is broken, gets challenging and disadvantageous for those in developing countries.
But don’t worry! Even if you or your institution cannot afford to pay APC, there are other open access options that you can consider to make your research widely available!
How do you make your cutting-edge research open access?
Before you select the journal to share your high-quality research in, it’s always good to explore what open-access licence that specific journal offer and whether this fits your requirements.
Why?
Not all journals are open access. A large fraction of journals is still charging subscription or a one-off fee for access. This means that if someone what’s to access your research, they need to purchase access to your article or specific journal issue.
Therefore, it is important to consider whether the journal you want to publish in offers the open access option.
Once you establish a list of journals that make your research OA, it’s important to consider what type of OA they offer. Broadly speaking, there are 4 different open access models that are often represented with different colours – hence the rainbow in the title! 🌈
Gold Open Access Journals
These journals make online access to your research via the publisher platform under the Creative Commons (CC) license.
These can be either full open access journals, which publish only OA papers, or hybrid journals. The latter publishes both subscription-based and OA papers.
When it comes to fees, the Gold OA route may attract an article processing charge. This is more likely in the hybrid journal, although the full open-access journal may also involve this charge.
Green Open Access Journals
In my view, this is an underutilised route to making your research open access.
What is green open access? It’s simple. You publish your research in a hybrid peer-reviewed journal or subscription journal at no cost (i.e. your work will be published behind the paywall and not everyone can access articles in that journal).
And for most of the researchers, that’s the end of the publication process.
But that’s not the end!
To make your paper Green Open Access, you can share your postprint, aka. author accepted copy, via subject repository or institutional repository.
You would need to include the reference to where your paper was first published, but I don’t think this is a major issue. Make sure you check the open-access policies of the specific publishers.
Also, self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. This means you can also share your work via communities and your website, as long as you acknowledge the original publication.
Bronze Open Access Journals
This route to open access is quite controversial. What do I mean by this? Let me explain.
If you select to publish in the bronze open access journal, then your article will be available for others to read on the publisher website, usually free of charge.
This is a good thing!
What’s the catch then?
The issue is that the bronze OA journals do not assign an open-access license to your review or research paper. This means that your work cannot be reshared or reused in a similar way as gold open access publications.
Diamond and platinum open access
This is the ultimate route to open access! Your paper is made open access for free to you, as an author, and to anyone who wants to read your work. There are no APCs or subscription costs. It involves similar open access licences as the gold OA.
Diamond Open Access Journals are usually funded via libraries, institutions, societies or any other external source.
Where to find open access journals?
Now that you know different types of OA journals, how do you find them? That’s where the Directory of Open Access Journals comes in. DOAJ is a search engine that helps you find open access journals and papers. It allows you to select a filter the results by area, APC, language etc.
Make sure you check the scope, readership and other metrics of the journal before you submit it.
Are open access journals reputable?
As with any journal, there are a couple of things you need to do to check the quality of the journal before you submit your awesome science.
Make sure that you submit your work to a peer-reviewed journal and check how does long the peer-review process take. If the journal promises you to do the review within 1-2 weeks, this looks rather suspicious and you should steer off such journals.
Also, check whether the journal is listed in DOAJ, ideal with DOAJ seal.
Finally, try to stick to recognised and reputable publishers. Remember to put priority to quality for your paper and the journal itself! I receive several requests to submit manuscripts to some random publishers a day. Reputable publishers won’t do this unless they launch a new journal or have a special issue.
A final word…
I trust this article will help you understand the fundamentals of open-access journal publishing. I believe that it is our responsibility as researchers to publish our current developments and make them as widely accessible as possible. Join the open access movement!
There is a wide variety of peer-reviewed open access journal routes that you can consider to publish your high-quality research. Some will have open access charges, some will be free of charge for you and for the readers.
Academic publications are still the key way to share our work. Although a broad range of journals is available for all range of disciplines, make sure you place priority to quality of the journal itself before you submit it.
Do you publish your work in open access journals?
