In the last of this week’s series of brief posts to celebrate #openaccessweek2018, we consider how you can make open research practice a part of your praxis as active researchers.
So, now we know what the routes to open access are, where can we go to publish openly?
As open scholarship is part of your research work lifecycle, open access doesn’t simply start after you have written the first draft of your manuscript. Open scholarship is something that needs to be baked throughout the entire research process, and not just considered at the point of submission for publication.
Preprints are the version of scholarly outputs that exist prior to their submission to a journal or editor for peer review. Sharing preprints mean that you can benefit from the input of others prior to peer review, helping to expedite the process of revision, and opening the doors to wider collaboration.
Many preprints servers exist in a wide range of disciplines, but the first and most established in the area of physics and mathematics is indisputably arXiv. However, this has spawned equivalents such as bioArxiv and socArxiv, that operate in similar models, but with a disciplinary limitation that makes sense for researchers in these disparate areas.
Perhaps the best starting place for helping ensure that you select the right place to submit your article is https://thinkchecksubmit.org. This website runs one through a series of questions to help you to ensure that the journal you are considering submitting your work to is a reputable title.
One of the resources it will recommend considering is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ works as a ‘whitelisting’ service that validates the credentials of a publisher, but it also is a directory of journals which you can interrogate to find reputable open access journals in your disciplinary area!
Of course, for your green open access needs, the UWL Repository is something that the UWL Publications Policy requires you to use, but there are also hundreds of subject repositories that you may also wish to deposit your accepted manuscript in to maximise its visibility in a range of indexes and locations.
But what about the research data that underpins your journal articles?
Well, we do not currently have an institutional data repository. However, there are other services that you can make use of. For instance Zenodo is an open source service developed and operated as part of the CERN project. Zenodo allows you to deposits data sets of up to 50gb each for free, and these can be open or closed. Similarly, figshare is a gratis service offering open and closed deposit spaces that come with a free DOI that can be provided to publishers to link the dataset to the paper.
As ever, we are here to help, and if you need to get in touch, you can always drop us an email. In the first instance why not contact our Research Support Manager, Kevin Sanders, via kevin.sanders@uwl.ac.uk 🙂