University Library News

Publishing in an open access (OA) journal gets your research to more people faster.  You may be concerned that OA journals don’t have comparable impact factors. In fact, many OA journals have scores comparable to traditionally published journals (see below).  Research also indicates that OA-published articles have better research impact than traditional publishing.

• BioMed Central journals, e.g., BMC Cancer = 3.153, BMC Genomics = 4.206, BMC Public Health = 2.364
• Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition = 2.675
• Journal of Medical Internet Research = 4.663
• Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development = 1.708
• Public Library of Science journals, e.g., PLoS One = 4.411
• Respiratory Research = 2.859

You can publish in an OA journal, or you can publish in a non-OA journal but self-archive your article in an OA archive or repository.  Publishers have different conditions or restrictions on self-archiving and author rights.  The SHERPA/RoMEO database describes the levels of publishers’ self-archiving policies using a color code.  Some hybrid OA journals may require an author fee.  One way to prepare for this fee is to write the expected publishing expenses into your grants as you submit your application, as suggested by Ed Seidel of the National Science Foundation, at his recent GSU lecture.

Open Access journals share research farther and faster.  Future repositories will hold data, software, slide sets, grey literature and more in addition to typical research articles.  Check out these OA health science journal titles the next time you need to research or publish and find out more during this week’s Open Access Week activities.