Select a publication venue
The scholarly publishing landscape is complex. Where you publish impacts the reach and potential publication costs of your research. There are many criteria that can be weighed when choosing where to publish, detailed below.
You can also check out Think. Check. Submit. for criteria you can use to evaluate a publication outlet.
Publication profile and impact factor
In an ideal world, scholars would feel free to publish their work where they believed it would be read by their most relevant audiences. However, many factors can make the decision about where to publish research complicated.
Perceived quality of scholarship matters when it comes to getting hired and promoted, but is also highly subjective. The prestige of the publisher may be used as a proxy for the quality of a monograph or journal. A journal’s overall Impact Factor may also be used as a proxy for the quality of an individual article. Both methods typically advantage long-standing, well-known publication venues.
Other quantitative measures that are based on traditional citation statistics also favor established, familiar publications. Various innovative altmetrics may help overcome these limits.
Author rights
A standard publication agreement often requires an author to transfer all copyrights to the publisher. Authors may then be unable to:
- Post their own article on their own website.
- Deposit their article in an institutional repository.
- Freely distribute a copy to students for course reading.
The good news is that authors can retain some or all of these rights by choosing a publisher with a non-exclusive agreement or using easy tools to manage their rights.
Ease of access
The ease of access can determine how broadly an article is read, cited, and discussed. The broader the access to a scholarly work, the greater its potential readership.
Access to subscription-based publications is limited because readers must pay to subscribe and read. Open access publications are available to anyone with an internet connection, in any part of the world, not just at well-funded universities.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database of fully open access journals that meet criteria for quality. Articles in journals indexed in DOAJ are more easily discoverable.
Costs
Publications cost money to produce, regardless of their model. How these costs are covered varies widely from one publication to another. These costs are often charged back to authors and readers.
Historically, subscriptions covered the costs associated with publishing. In order to make articles available more openly, some journals began charging authors fees for publication. Fees associated with publishing may be going to more than just the costs of publishing. That revenue may:
- Support other activities of scholarly societies.
- Offset costs of open access publications for authors from developing nations.
- Support the profit margins of for-profit publishers.
As an author, you can decide whether you want to publish in a journal that requires a fee to publish, whether you would like your article to be behind a journal’s paywall, or if you want to support a more sustainable open access publishing option. Your decision may be influenced by:
- How much funding you have available for your work.
- Whether your funding can be used to pay for publication fees.
- Whether the Libraries has an agreement to offset publishing costs
- Your perspectives on different open access publishing models.
Why we don’t recommend using tools that help you find journals
Some publishers offer tools that provide researchers with a list of journals that might be suitable publication venues based on their abstract.
The Libraries does not recommend that authors use these tools, as they will frequently return only journals that are within a publisher’s own catalog and may exclude low- or no-cost journals published by other organizations. Additionally, an abstract alone will not include information about any of the other factors discussed on this page, which should inform the selection of a publication venue.
Contact
Contact your subject librarian or [email protected] to learn more about publication venues for your research. Request a consultation.