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Open Access and Scholarly Communications: Preparing to Publish
Created by Health Science Librarians
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.
Resources
- Think. Check. Submit.A tool for helping researchers to more easily identify high-quality journals. The website includes a predatory publishing checklist and many other resources.
- TOP Guidelines/TOP FactorTOP Factor allows you to search about 3,000 prominent journals based on their compliance with the TOP open science guidelines: Data Citation, Data Transparency, Analysis Code Transparency, Materials Transparency, Design & Analysis Reporting Guidelines, Study Preregistration, Analysis Plan Preregistration, Replication, Registered Reports & Publication Bias, and Open Science Badges.
Open Access Publishing Options -- Journals
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)DOAJ has a searchable index of over 20,000 open access journals, with information about publication fees, journal policies, average submission to publication time, and license details for most journals.
- 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.
- Sage PublicationsSage publishes over 1,200 journals in almost every discipline. Starting January 1, 2023, any paper with a UNC-Chapel Hill corresponding author may publish open access in almost any Sage journal for free.
Open Access Publishing Options -- Monographs
- OAPEN Online Library of Open Access BooksOAPEN provides open infrastructure services to publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
- Open Book PublishersA leading independent Open Access publisher in the UK which is scholar-run and not-for-profit. All books are available online for free download, and in most cases, authors do not have to pay Book Processing Charges (BPCs).
- Path to OpenA pilot program developed by UNC Press, the University of Michigan Press, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and operationalized by JSTOR. In this program, monographs become open access three years after publication, a new experimental approach to expanding open access to monographs.
- MIT Press Direct-to-OpenEach year, MIT Press aims to open 80-90 monographs from the previous year's collections. The model relies on proceeds from library subscriptions to allow authors to publish open access.
UNC Scholarly Communications Office
The Scholarly Communications Officer provides guidance, policy development, and advocacy to faculty, students, and staff on the following issues:
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Copyright and fair use
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Authors’ rights
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Privacy rights
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Open access
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Policy related to scholarly material
For more information, visit the Scholarly Communications Office webpage, or contact Scholarly Communications Officer Anne Gilliland, MSLS, JD.