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 techn