Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Find and Select Open Access Journals and publishers

Where to find and select Open Access journals and publishers?

Finding journals and publishers for your work

As a first step, we recommend you to consult your institutional librarian about fully Open Access publication forums, partnerships, transformative agreements, publication grants and other funding opportunities that are available for your institution.

For a bigger picture, you can browse the biggest, trusted catalogs of Open Access publication venues, such as the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Selecting journal and publishers for your work

Before selecting a publication venue for your work, it is important to make your expectations towards the journal/publisher clear. Beyond audience, outreach and the prestige of the journal/book series/publisher in your field, here are a couple of additional criteria.

• Does the publication venue transparent communication of the per review process, publication fees, and Open Access policy?
• Is this policy compliant with your institution's or funder's mandate (note for example that many research funders does not allow for publishing in hybrid Open Access journals).
• Do they assign rich metadata and Persistent Identifiers (such as a DOI) to their publications?
• Are they indexed by scholarly discovery services such as Google Scholar, Project MUSE or the OpenAIRE Research Graph?

The last two aspects are important for the discoverability and visibility of your research in the increasingly noisy scholarly communication landscape.

Many Swiss universities have Open Access transformative agreements with big publishers such as Taylor and Francis, De Gruyter or Springer Nature or in place. Still, we recommend to select an Open Access publication venue with the principles of FAIR Open Access in mind. There are a number of community-owned Open Access publishers and journals who make their services available on a free-to-read-free-to-publish basis. For instance, the Open Edition platform gives an overview of such Open Access journals and book publishers mainly (but not exclusively) in French speaking areas. In this blog post, you can find further examples.

Tool to select journals:

• The Think. Check. Submit. platform provides a useful checklist to identify trusted journals that meet your expectations as an author.

Tools to select books series, book publishers:

• The Open Access Books Toolkit provides an inventory of the most frequently asked questions around topics like selecting a publisher, funding, peer review, licensing, or dissemination. It is curated by OAPEN, the biggest European network to achieve a sustainable publication model and increased visibility for academic books in humanities and social sciences.
• ‘The OA Mythbusters’ series by the Open Access Book Network