What is Open Access Publishing?
- Harvard Scholar,
Peter Suber defines Open-Access (OA) literature “as digital, online, free
of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” (this is
made possible by the article being made freely available on the internet and
the consent of the author or copyright holder.)
- The Public Library
of Online Science (PLOS) defines Open Access as “unrestricted access and
unrestricted use.”
Open Access Publishing
How open is it? A guide for
evaluating the openness of journals.
- From SPARC
(the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
- This guide
provides a means to identify the core components of OA and how they are
implemented across the spectrum between “Open Access” and
“Closed Access”.
Protecting Your Intellectual Property
Why Open Access vs. the traditional publishing model?
- Most publishers
own the rights to the articles in their journals, so readers must pay to access
them. Permission to use the article in anyway must be obtained from the
publisher and usually involves an additional fee.
- Even though access
to the journals at the School of Medicine appears to be free from the library
website, the truth is, most of them are not. The library usually does extensive
negotiating with publishers to obtain site licenses to online journals for our
campuses, and these licenses can be very expensive.
What are the benefits of Open Access Research?
- Accelerated
Discovery. With open access, researchers can read and build on the findings of
others without restriction. (Meaning you don’t have to ask for permission
to use – it’s unrestricted access and unrestricted use).
- Public Enrichment.
Much scientific and medical research is paid for with public funds. Open Access
allows taxpayers to see the results of their investment.
- Improved
Education. Open Access means that teachers and their students have access to
the latest research findings throughout the world.
Is Open Access free?
- OA literature is
not free to produce, but it is sometimes less expensive than conventionally
published literature. One of the goals of OA is not to make scholarly
literature costless, but to find a way to shift costs from readers which
results in access barriers.
- Generally, the
cost is paid for by the author, the author's institution, or the author's grant
funding source.
How is OA delivered?
- Green OA - The
author and publisher negotiate to allow a version of the article made publicly
available through a personal archive, website or institutional repository.
- Hybrid Model
– “Pay to Publish” An article from a subscription journal
becomes Open Access by a payment of a publication fee.
- Gold OA – Open access literature
is online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions.
- NIH Mandate –
Will become uploaded into PubMed Central system 12 months after publication.
- SPARC (the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) provides an
author
addendum that can help secure your rights as the author of an article.
What is Predatory Open Access Publishing?
Predatory publishers
share several characteristics:
- They engage in
questionable business practices, such as charging excessive author fees or
failing to disclose publication fees to potential authors.
- They fail to
follow accepted standards of scholarly publishing, particularly in regards to
peer review.
- They exist to make
money by taking advantage of the "author-pays model" of open access journal
publishing,* and have no interest in promoting scholarship or advancing
knowledge.
*Charging
authors/funding bodies to publish articles open access is a model used by many
reputable journal publishers and is not the single factor used to determine if
a journal should be considered "predatory." For further information, please
review
Principles
of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing by the Open
Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Other
collaborators in providing transparency and best practice in scholarly
publishing:
In an
interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education,
Prof. Jeffrey Beall describes the phenomenon this way:
"Predatory open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally
exploit the gold open-access model for their own profit. That is to say, they
operate as scholarly vanity presses and publish articles in exchange for the
author fee. They are characterized by various level of deception and lack of
transparency in their operations. For example, some publishers may misrepresent
their location, stating New York instead of Nigeria, or they may claim a
stringent peer-review where none really exists."
Predatory publishers
may also claim to be included in directories and indexes when they are not and
include faculty on their editorial boards who have not agreed to
serve.
Predatory publishers
began profilerating in the past few years with the increase in open access
publishing, and we are now also seeing an increase in predatory conferences,
some which choose a name nearly identical to an established, well-respected
conference.
Journalytics
notes journals identified as engaging in deceptive, fraudulent, and/or
predatory practices.
Jeffrey Beall, a
librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, had compiled lists of
"potential, possible, or probable predatory" journals and publishers. As of
January 2017 the list is no longer updated, but thanks to the Internet Archive
his work can still be viewed thanks to the snapshot. More details on the end of
the list can be read at
Retraction
Watch.
What is My Role as an Author or Contributor?
Authorship confers
credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications.
Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work.
The following recommendations from the Internation Committee of Medical Journal
Editors (ICMJE) are intended to ensure that contributors who have made
substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are given credit as authors,
but also that contributors credited as authors understand their role in taking
responsibility and being accountable for what is published.
Defining
the Role of Authors and Contributors
How Do I Avoid Predatory Publishers?
Contact your
department's Library Liaison
for a second (or first) opinion about the authenticity of a publisher or
journal. We're happy to help faculty, students and staff identify reliable,
quality scholarly publishing venues.
Think, Check, Submit!
- There are
reputable journals that are completely open or have open access options. But
there are other journals you should avoid. Choose carefully.
- Think before
submitting your manuscript to an unfamiliar journal - - publishing in a
predatory journal may damage your reputation and/or weaken your promotion and
tenure portfolio.
Use the following
checklist, provided by Declan Butler in Nature, as a guide for assessing publishers and
journals:
How to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or
publisher.
- Check that the
publisher provides full, verifiable contact information, including address, on
the journal site. Be cautious of those that provide only web contact
forms.
- Check that a
journal's editorial board lists recognized experts with full affiliations.
Contact some of them and ask about their experience with the journal or
publisher.
- Check that the
journal prominently displays its policy for author fees.
- Be wary of e-mail
invitations to submit to journals or to become editorial board
members.
- Read some of the
journal's published articles and assess their quality. Contact past authors to
ask about their experience.
- Check that a
journal's peer-review process is clearly described and try to confirm that a
claimed impact factor is correct.
- Find out whether
the journal is a member of an industry association that vets its members, such
as the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org) or the Open Access Scholarly
Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org).
[Some questionable journals appear in directories such as DOAJ and Cabell's; we
don't advise using this as your sole criteria.]
- Use common sense,
as you would when shopping online: if something looks fishy, proceed with
caution.
A more extensive
ruberic for evaluating journals, the
Journal Evaluation
Tool, is provided by the Library staff at Loyola Marymount University and
the Loyola Law School.
How Do I Choose the Right Journal?
Journalytics Medicine
- With in-depth
information on over 7,000 verified medical journals and 16,000 predatory
journals, this curated database provides submission guidelines, detailed
metrics, historical trends, and more. It helps researchers, librarians,
funders, and administrators discover, verify, and evaluate quality medical
journals.
- Users can assess
verified medical publications across 37 disciplines by browsing, searching, or
filtering for specific goals. Every publication included in Journalytics
Medicine has been hand-verified and evaluated using a comprehensive set of
selection criteria. Journal listings include bibliographic information,
submission and manuscript details, access model, fee, and reuse information,
and citation-backed metrics providing measures of discipline strength,
influence, and attention.
- Each entry in
Predatory Reports displays information on how to identify the journal in the
real world as well as a comprehensive report detailing each violation that was
uncovered during the journal’s evaluation. Journals are examined by
Cabells review teams against more than 70 behaviors that contradict standard
industry practices and are indicative of deception. Predatory Reports provides
complete records of a publication’s behaviors broken down by level of
severity in categories such as integrity, peer review, publication and business
practices, fees, indexing, and more.
Not sure where to
publish or what journals are available in your field? Interested in publishing
across multiple disciplines? Check out Ulrichsweb, a global serials directory,
which lists over 300,000 publications worldwide.
Ulrichsweb (Global Serials Directory)
- Ulrichsweb.com is an authoritative knowledgebase of information
about more than 300,000 serials of all types from around the world -- academic
and scholarly journals, peer-reviewed titles, online publications, newspapers
and other resources.
| Ulrichsweb.com (Ulrich's Periodical Directory) may be used to
identify "scholarly" journals. The icon of the referee's shirt indicates that
the journal is peer-reviewed. |
 |
If the icon
is not present, the journal is not peer-reviewed. "As used in the Ulrich's
knowledgebase, the term refereed is applied to a journal that has been
peer-reviewed. Refereed serials include articles that have been reviewed by
experts and respected researchers in specific fields of study including the
sciences, technology, the social sciences, and arts and humanities."
 |
If the title
is academic/scholarly, the Basic Description section will include a line that
says: "Content Type: Academic/Scholarly" |
You can
see if the journal is indexed in MEDLINE, Web of Science, or other legitimate
indexing and abstracting services by looking in the Abstracting & Indexing
section.
Click on "Search for Full Text" located to the far right of the
journal title to see if the libraries have a subscription to that journal.
Use "JCR Web" to check for an impact factor of the journal.
Journal Citation Reports
You can access Journal
Citation Reports (JCR), a product of Thomson Reuters,via
Web of
Science (look for the link
 at the top of the
page). Published annually, JCR provides a number of journal impact measurements
for journals in the sciences and social sciences. Reported metrics include
Impact Factor, 5-year Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, and others. Since 2007,
JCR has also included Eigenfactor Metrics. Learn
more:
Journal
Citation Reports Training Videos and Quick Reference Cards
Brief videos
and information sheets - both available in multiple languages. There is also a
link to live and recorded trainings.
JournalGuide
- A free tool
created by a group of software developers, former researchers, and scholarly
publishing veterans at Research
Square to help researchers evaluate scholarly journals in which to publish
with the goal to bring all sources of data together in one place to give
authors a simple way to choose the best journal for their research.
- Search, filter,
sort, and compare journals from more than 46,000 titles.
- Search by journal
name, category, publisher, manuscript title or abstract.
Journal/Author Name
Estimator (JANE)
- This service
originates in the Netherlands, is free, and is funded by
the Netherlands Bioinformatics
Center
- It is limited to
journals included in Medline, a database published by the U.S. National Library
of Medicine
- Author’s
enter the title and/or abstract of their paper in a box, and click on 'Find
journals', 'Find authors' or 'Find Articles'. JANE will then compare the
document to millions of documents in Medline to find the best matching
journals, authors or articles.
- JANE uses the
Article Influence (AI) score that measures how often articles in the journal
are cited within the first five years after its publication. These citations
are weighted based the influence of the journals from which citations are
received: being cited in an article in Science can boost a journal's AI more
than being cited in an article in an obscure journal. For more detailed
information, see the eigenfactor.org
website.
Edanz Journal
Selector
- Edanz Group, a Beijing-based company that
provides English language editing and support services for the worldwide
scientific community, has launched a free, online tool aimed at helping
scientists and academic researchers find the most appropriate outlets for their
articles.
- The selector tool
works by comparing the author’s abstract, or short article description,
with keywords from abstracts from a database of more than 28,000 journal
titles.
- Results are ranked
by relevance, or an author can choose to filter and refine the results by
Clarivate Impact Factor
(JCR), by preference for Open Access, or by frequency of publication.
Publish or Perish
Publish or Perish is
a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses
Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search to obtain the raw citations, then
analyzes these and presents impact metrics including H-index and
others.
Please note:
You should take care when using this software because Google Scholar citations
are not always from scholarly journals or books. Publish or Perish allows you
to screen these out and recalculate so your numbers are not inappropriately
inflated.
For more information about impact
factors, see Measuring Your Research
Impact
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