Open Access

Do you have sufficient funds to cover publishing costs?

The price of open access and who is responsible for the associated costs needs to be carefully considered in order to find a cost efficient and sustainable balance. Funding agencies including the ARC and NHMRC allow up to 2% of a grant to be spent on publication costs.

• Fees for OA vary depending on the journal and discipline and can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
• When applying for grants, include publication costs as a line item in the budget proposal.

If no funds available

• Many OA journals, particularly in the social sciences and humanities fields do not require payment.
• Consider Delayed OA journals or avoid fees by submitting a version in espace.

Another alternative is to deposit a version of the article into the repository.

• You can do this for almost any journal.
• For more information see Add to OA repository.

Would you like the article to be available open access immediately?

Consider how quickly and what version of the article will be made openly accessible and the impact this could have on the dissemination of your research.

• Fully open access and hybrid journals provide immediate open access upon publication.
• This is particularly important in fields with rapid developments.

• Some journals make articles open access on the publisher's website after an embargo.
• This requires no action by the author.
• Not all journals provide this option and the length of the embargo varies.

Will the journal reach the right audience?

Publishing in the right journal for your discipline will help reach the appropriate target audience. You can either search for an OA journal, or identify a journal and then identify the OA policy

• The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides an option to browse OA journals by subject or title.
• Major OA publishers include BioMed Central and PLOS. Traditional publishers like Wiley, SAGE and Elsevier are also producing open access journals.

• Locate a journal using Current Contents Connect, Journal Citation Reports and Scopus Sources to browse for titles by subject.
• Use SHERPA/RoMEO to determine a journal's open access policy.

What peer review process does the journal go through?

As with traditional journals peer review is an important standard of quality control that should be considered. The open access movement was founded on scholarly, peer reviewed content.

• Most OA journals undergo the same peer review process as traditional journals.
• In most cases, journals only take payment after manuscript has been accepted, avoiding perceived conflict of interest.
• Determine any journal's OA Policy
• In order to increase the speed of dissemination there has been a move towards post publication peer review.

Are there quality open access journals?

Apply the same quality control measures to OA journals as when selecting traditional channels of publication.

• OA journals vary in quality the same as subscription based journals.
• A lack of prestige does not in itself preclude quality; prestige and reputation build over time and most OA journals are relatively new.
• Be wary of 'predatory publishers' who claim to produce scholarly, OA journals but in fact produce low quality, profit driven journals via unethical practices.
• Indicators of potentially predatory behaviour include publishers that spam professional email lists, very high acceptance rates and non-existent peer review processes.

What is the journal's impact?

Metrics or citation data are commonly used to measure the impact of a journal. See the Measure research impact and quality LibGuide for more information about journal metrics.

• The most commonly used metrics are the Impact Factor and the SNIP and SJR.
• As OA journals tend to be newer this will tend to affect their rank and impact factors but it does not necessarily mean lower quality.
• However, some OA journals are amongst the top journals in their field, such as PLOS biology.