LibGuides: Research and Scholarship: Open Access

Benefits of Open Access

According to SPARC, Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research. Watch this short video to learn about Open Access and why you should try publishing in OA journals.

NIH Public Access Policy: To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication.

Journal Evaluation Tool This rubric was created to assist you in making the best decision to chose a credible journal title.

Publishing in Open Access Journals - Fall 2020

Avoiding Predatory Publishers and Conferences

Here are some resources to help you identify predatory journals, publishers and conferences. Watch the video first!

Academics and Scientists: Beware of Predatory Journal Publishers
Predatory Journals An archived version of Jeffrey Beall's list of possibly predatory stand-alone journals. This is a list that is no longer updated but may be helpful in choosing a journal.
Predatory Publishers An archived version of Jeffrey Beall's list of possibly predatory publishers. This is a list that is no longer updated but may be helpful in choosing a journal.
Think. Check. Attend. Your guide to avoiding predatory conferences
Think. Check. Submit. Choose the right journal to publish
Be iNFORMED by Duke University A checklist to assess a journal or publisher
NIH Statement

Selected list of trusted Open Access Journal Collections

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals: Free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages.
PubMed Central: PubMed Central is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
ArXiv: Open access to nearly 800,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, and Quantitative Finance and Statistics. Many of these articles are in preprint format.
BioMed Central: BioMed Central publishes 243 peer-reviewed open-access journals.
Royal Society Open Science: Open journal publishing research across all of science, engineering, and mathematics.
PeerJ: The Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences is a peer-reviewed & Open Access journal publishing primary research and reviews in biology, life sciences, environmental sciences, and medicine.
PLoS: Public Library of Science: PLoS is one of the first and most significant open-access publishers in the sciences,
Royal Society Open Biology: Open access journal publishing high-impact biology at the molecular and cellular level
SpringerOpen: Provides a list of OA journals by subjects
Elsevier's OA Journals: Open Access journals by Elsevier
Taylor & Francis OA Journals: Open Access journals by T&F