Freely accessible journals
An increasing number of research fields are getting good freely accessible alternatives for publishing as the number of OA journals is constantly growing.
Directory of Open Access Journals – DOAJ, is an internationally leading register of quality controlled OA journals. DOAJ aims to cover all subjects and all languages, and now also lists traditional journals with an open access publishing option. It is the Lund University Libraries Head Office that runs and provides DOAJ.
Some OA journals charge a publishing fee. The fee covers administration costs for the journal’s publishing. Several universities help their researchers by paying for part of the publishing fee.
Many OA journals are new and lack so called impact factors. Impact factors are based on the number of citations, and therefore take a few years to build up. Other quality indicators include acceptance within the researcher community and indexation in important subject databases, such as Web of Science.
Electronic journal publishing
Lund University Libraries Head Office provides journal owners and editors with a system for conversion of printed journals to electronic OA journals. We gladly discuss journal publishing and share our experiences.
Hybrid journals
Many publishers offer authors the possibility to publish accepted articles with immediate free access, at the same time as the article is published in the publisher’s subscription journals. This kind of subscription journal is called a hybrid journal.
If the author chooses to publish the article with free access, a publishing fee must be paid. This model is still quite new, and it is not yet clear how the journals will mark the OA articles among the rest. It is also unclear how a reduction in the subscription fee, relative to the number of OA articles, will be administered.
Last updated: December 18, 2009
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