Graduate Research Portal: Publishing

The Lethbridge Journal Incubator is an initiative of the University of Lethbridge Library and School of Graduate Studies.  The Incubator addresses the sustainability of scholarly communication by aligning it with the University's educational and research mission within an open access publishing context.  Producing scholarly communication is thus transformed from a cost centre diverting resources away from the institutional core mission into a sustainable, high-impact and mission-critical endeavour.

Some publishers make it difficult or impossible for authors to reuse their work in other places once it has been submitted and accepted for publication. By partnering with this type of publisher, you are trading away your intellectual property for a place in their journal. However, there are ways to try to retain partial or full author's rights to the work you publish.

SHERPA/RoMEO

Developed at the University of Nottingham with the help of partners around the world, SHERPA/RoMEO allows individuals to search for journals or publishers by name and view their copyright and self-archiving policies.This will provide you with information such as whether you can archive pre/post-print versions of your paper.  In addition, links are provided to publishers' copyright policies.

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) is a global coalition dedicated to advancing open ccess, Open data and open education resources. In their quest to promote unimpeded public access to scholarly research, SPARC has developed a number of different procedures for helping authors retain their rights and so their ability to share their knowledge. For example, SPARC has developed an Author Rights Brochure which provides information and advice about copyright, your work and how to retain your rights. SPARC has also created an addendum that authors can use to modify their copyright transfer agreements to journal publishers.

CAUT Intellectual Property Advisory

This CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) advisory encouraging university faculty to give publishers only the right to publish their work for the first time is also applicable to authors who are graduate students.  Retaining your copyrights in your journal article other than first publication means you will be able to reuse it in the future without encountering barriers embedded in the publishing agreement you are required by the publisher to sign.  The CAUT advisory endorses use of the SPARC Canadian Author's Addendum to Publication Agreement.

With thousands of different journals accepting new papers for publication (and more being created every year), finding the right journal for you to submit your article manuscript can be a difficult task. Some tips from Sarah Conte include the following:

• Determine the aim and scope of the journal:
  • This information can usually be found on the journal's homepage and will inform you of the type of material they typically do or do not publish. For example, while Clinical Cancer Research "prioritizes laboratory and animal studies of new drugs and molecular targeted agents," PLOS ONE "casts an even broader net, accepting reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine" (Conte)
• Search for articles similar to yours is content and scope:
  • If you are able to find published articles similar to your own, there is a good chance that your article will be of interest to the publisher, "Identifying previously published papers in your specific subject area is excellent evidence that your research topic is of interest to the audience of a particular journal, which will increase your chances of review" (Conte)
• Learn about the journal's restrictions:
  • Even if a journal appears to be a perfect fit for your work based on its aim and current content, there may still be issues with format or cost. As Conte goes on to note, "if your manuscript is 7000 words and the journal accepts papers no longer than 4000 words, a substantial revision will obviously be required". Likewise, the cost of being published in a particular journal may be more than you/your department can afford

Works Cited

Conte, Sarah. "Choosing the Right Journal for Your Researching." American Journal Experts. American Journal Experts, 3 March 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2016.

Publishing your research in an open access journal or book may be an attractive alternative to a traditional commercial publishing arrangement if you seek to retain some of your copyrights and promote barrier-free knowledge sharing. The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative defines open access as

free availability [of scholarly literature] on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Advantages of open access publishing (beyond stronger post-publication authors' rights) include:

• easier access to scholarly research for everyone
• greater visibility and impact of research
• better return on investment for research sponsors
• strengthening of the educational mission of advancing knowledge
• facilitation of lawful reuse of copyrighted works such as text mining.

Furthermore, many federal research granting agencies such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), which together comprise Canada's Tri-Agencies, have adopted policies requiring public access to be available to agency-supported research.  The Tri-Agencies open access policy applies to all grants awarded from May 1, 2015 forward.

To avoid open access journals that may use "predatory" practices, see an archived version of  Beall's List which is no longer maintained.

For more information about Open Access, please see our Library guide