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Benefits of Publishing Your Work Open Access: Debunking Myths

Oct 2016
 
Authors
By Tarryn Greenberg, Senior Publisher
Open Access, Health Learning, Research & Practice, Wolters Kluwer

As an author, are you interested in whether or not to publish your research in an open access (OA) journal? OA publishing has come under a lot of scrutiny recently in the scholarly community with the ever-increasing growth in the number of predatory publishers (Beall’s List1 now includes 1,085 predatory publishers) and the concern over the quality of OA publications. Like most things in life, OA has its supporters and detractors. This article will debunk some of the myths surrounding OA and provide you with some benefits of publishing your research under an OA model.

But first, below are some tips to avoid being caught by predatory publishers claiming to publish OA articles.

Before choosing a journal to submit your work to, check to see if your journal of choice is included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high-quality, OA, peer-reviewed journals. In addition, there are a number of other important questions authors need to consider before submitting a manuscript. Here is a brief list of helpful questions to get you started:2-4

First, if the journal is a reputable journal publishing OA articles, the answers to these four questions should be “yes”:


Next, ask the following six questions. An answer of “yes” to any of these questions should be enough of red flag to stop and raise concerns about the journal and its practices:

Should you decide to submit your work to a journal published by Wolters Kluwer Open Health (WKOH), under either a gold or hybrid model of OA, you can look forward to the following benefits:5,6


Additional Resources

Glossary of Key OA Terms

  • Article Processing Charge (APC): This is a payment that allows the article to be freely available online in perpetuity. The costs cover peer‐review, copyediting, hosting, and promotion of the article. An APC can be paid for by the funder, author, institution, or a sponsor. Additional page and color charges apply on some hybrid journals. The article processing charges vary for different titles for a variety of factors such as the size of the journal, volume of submissions, etc.
  • Free access: “Free” is generic for any content at no cost, like a website, YouTube videos, free abstracts, or articles that are made free for promotion. Though the content is free to read, reuse and sharing is limited by standard copyright and licensing restrictions that applies to all non-open access content. OA content is free permanently on all online locations and allows users to link, read, download, store, use, and data-mine the digital content of that article without copyright or licensing restrictions. OA licenses (the Creative Commons licenses detailed above) set some restrictions on commercial and derivative uses of open access content.
  • Gold OA: Following the payment of an APC, articles are made OA immediately upon publication and the author retains copyright. This can occur in both fully OA journals as well as subscription (or “hybrid”) journals.
  • Hybrid model: The hybrid model of OA is when a journal has a combination of OA and subscription articles. Authors have a choice to pay a fee for the article to be immediately accessible online. The author retains copyright of the article. OA articles are subject to the same peer-review process as any article within that journal.
  • Open Access: The free, immediate, online access, for any user, web‐wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment and published in peer‐reviewed journals.

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