LibGuides: Open Access and Scholarly Communications: Preparing to Publish

Identifying and Evaluating Publishing Options

For help with identifying and evaluating open access publications, contact the library liaison for your subject area or Scholarly Communications Officer Anne Gilliland, MSLS, JD.

If you've found an open access journal relevant to your research and want to ensure its quality, check if the journal is included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and see if the publisher is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).

Other evaluation criteria you might want to consider include the journal's profit model, peer review process, journal metrics and impact factor, and the credentials of the editorial board and previously published authors. For more information, see the positive and negative indicators described in this guide to assessing journal quality from Boston College University Libraries.

Open Access/Open Archive Publishing Options -- Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Aims to provide centralized access to all open access scientific and scholarly journals.
Highwire Press
A publisher with some open access titles and many more that are open archive, Highwire frequently partners with independent scholarly publisher, societies, and associations.
Hindawi
Hindawi charges different fees per journal, usually ranging between $425 to $1075. Look for the Article Processing Charges link within each journal page for more information.
Open Library of Humanities
"The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a gold open access, peer-reviewed, internationally-supported, academic-led, not-for-profit, mega-journal, multi-journal and books platform for the humanities. It is funded by an international library consortium and so has no author-facing charges."
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
A nonprofit organization committed to making scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

Open Access/Open Archive Publishing Options -- Monographs

Cambridge University Press: Open Access Monograph Publishing Service
CUP's service gives authors the option of publishing their work under the Gold Open Access model or participating in Green Open Access Archiving: This new policy allows authors to make their works or portions of their works freely available online without compromising any aspect of the publishing process.
Knowledge Unlatched
"The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF."