You (or perhaps your advisor) saw an advertisement for a new Open Access journal that looks like a good choice for publishing the paper you just completed. What’s the next step?
A good place to start is a new FAQ put together by Paul Frantz, the Libraries’ Head of Reference.
Open Access journals aren’t very different from other journals. The defining difference is that OA journals publish online and don’t charge for subscriptions or access. That’s great for visibility — an article published in an OA journal is available to a broad range of scholars and members of the public, whereas many subscription journals are available only in a couple of hundred academic library collections. Perhaps as a result, some studies have found that articles in OA journals are on average cited more than those in comparable traditional journals.
But, even with the Internet, publishing still isn’t free. Many — not all — OA journals, particularly in the sciences, pay for their costs by charging author’s a fee for acceptance, much like the page charges that journals often levied during the last century. Fees range per article from $100 to $2000 or more. There’s some risk that unscrupulous publishers would use the OA model to create a vanity press where authors pay to publish, but even worse would be the surprise you’d get after your manuscript was accepted if you didn’t expect an author processing charge. The moral:
- When submitting to an OA journal, check the instructions for authors carefully to see if there is any author fee. Also, the Directory of Open Access Journals notes whether any particular OA journal has a fee.
- If you want to publish but are deterred by a a fee, see if the library can help. The UO Libraries has a fund available to help cover these costs. See http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis/oaps.html.
