Open access simply means that an article (or textbook, or data set, etc.) is freely available for anyone to read without paying for it. The cost for universities to purchase access to articles from traditional publishers has skyrocketed in the last few decades, so only the richest institutions are able to purchase access to certain research. This is bad for researchers, who may not be able to afford all of the relevant research in their areas; authors, who can’t distribute their work as widely as they would otherwise and so get cited less often; universities, who have to pay more and more money for the same or fewer journals; and clinical practitioners and the general public who often don’t have access to them at all.
Open access has become the trend in scholarly publishing to combat this. A lot of funders of social science research now require that research be made open access.
Some open access journals are high quality and have a peer review process that all articles go through. On the other hand, predatory journals have taken advantage of the push for open access and so have given open access a bad reputation in certain areas. However, if you’re checking things like how many times and article is cited and the journal’s impact factor, you’ll know something is fishy with that publication.
A journal will tell you that they are open access on their website.
History
Open access (OA) has come to symbolize the revolution in scholarly publishing, though the revolution goes much deeper and is much wider. Fundamentally, open access means what it says, access to scholarly works in the open -- without paywalls and with a license for reuse. This concept has been around for well over 20 years and had its roots in what became known as the crisis in scholarly publishing - the double-digit inflation in the prices of serials over a decade or so that threatened to completely upend the relationship between books and journals in collection development. At one time many thought moving scholars' research results to freely accessible institutional or disciplinary servers would ultimately bring down the prices of journals, if not eliminate the need for them altogether. This has turned out to be illusory. Publishers have us over a barrel for the most part, and they know it and act accordingly. It is ironic that it's our own content they use to reap their generous profit margins from us, but we're the ones who willingly give over the content and then fork over the money to buy it back. What do we expect normal ordinary for-profit publishers to do? They owe allegiance to their shareholders. Well, enough crying over the spilt milk.
Today
Open access is gaining traction; there are advances on legal fronts; and business models are evolving to acknowledge the inevitability of OA. It only seems a matter of time before the opportunity will be a reality for every single scholar to have his or her work available freely on the web. But that same work will in many cases still be published in exactly the same journal that the scholar might have published in 20 years ago, though it will have gone through a couple of name changes and be owned by one of the 2 or 3 publishers left in the field. Consolidations have been pro forma. This is not to say that there won't be grand departures from the norm also, new modes of scholarly communication and publication, but I think that we'll have quite traditional publishing with us, though not alone on the stage as it is today, for a long time.
As content stops being king, services are likely to take its place. Publishers will compete for subscription dollars based not on what articles they allow you to make available, but on what services they allow you to offer built on the corpus of freely available materials. It will be interesting to see whether competition in services will be more robust (i.e. affecting prices) than competition in scholarly articles is. That was always a big part of the problem with content as king: articles were not fungible. One journal's content could never substitute for another's. Articles are unique, as are their authors. But services are easier to duplicate, except to the degree they are based on patents, but let's not get off on that tangent.
Open access resources
There are so many sources for information on this topic. If you just want to know the basics, the first stop is SPARC. If you really want to dig into resources, I recommend the Open Access Directory. And, if you'd like to see some open access social work and related journals, check out the Open Access Social Work guide. You can also determine what most publishers' policies are regarding open access at Sherpa's RoMeo site.
Public access requirements
Many funding agencies are now requiring grantees to share the results of their research - both scholarly articles and data. The NIH has required grant recipients to share their articles via PubMed Central since 2008. Since that time, many federal funding agencies have come up with their own data and publication sharing plans. SPARC has a really great comparison tool that looks at funding agency requirements for data. It's quite likely that researchers applying for grants will have some sort of sharing requirement they need to comply with. Librarians on most college campuses are available to assist researchers that have questions about these requirements.
Wondering where to publish your research? Start by developing a list of potential journals that might fit your work.
Journal metrics such as Impact Factor, acceptance rates or h-indices can help you determine how a journal stacks up against other journals in the field and may help you determine where to submit your manuscript. These numbers can vary wildly between disciplines, so only compare the impact factor of a journal with other journals in the same discipline.
A journal's Impact Factor is determined by taking the number of times articles within the journal have been cited over the previous two years and dividing by the number of articles published. Citations used for this calculation are based on Web of Science (Social Science Citation Index) data.
You can find metrics for a specific journal or compare journal metrics for items indexed in Scopus by clicking on the "compare journals" link. On the Compare journals search page search for journals you'd like to compare, by name, by publisher or by specific ISSN number.
Acceptance rates for journals can sometimes be found in directories, though the databases is selective about which journals they track. If your journal isn't included, or an acceptance rate isn't listed, go to the journal website to see if it's available there, or try contacting the journal editor.
An h-index is the highest number of articles a journal has published that have been cited at least than many times. So, a journal with an h-index of 57 has published 57 articles that have been cited at least 57 times. As the number of highly-cited articles rises, so does the h-index.
A true h-index considers citations over the journal's life (or all the years citations have been tracked by the tool doing the calculation). An h5-index looks at the most recent 5 years, and is often a better indicator of a journal's current influence.
Google Metrics is a great source for finding an h5-index for education journals because Google Scholar's coverage of education literature is broader than other citation tracking tools (SSCI/Web of Science and Scopus).
Scimago offers a variety of data points that are calculated based on citation data from Scopus. When calculating its main metric, the SJR Indicator, Scimago uses three previous years of publications (rather than the two years used to calculate Impact Factors) and considers the prestige of the journal where an article is cited.
H-indexes listed here may vary from those in Web of Science or Google Scholar simply because they all have different years of coverage for each title.
In 2010 the publication of the Altmetrics Manifesto called attention to a new source of data that could be used to measure the impact of research. These author and article-level metrics use evidence from a researcher's digital footprint to assess the impact and influence of that researcher in ways that are different, but complementary to, citation-based indicators that measure the influence of only peer-reviewed journal articles.
Altmetrics uses real-time and openly accessible data from social media and other online tools to allow researchers to quickly measure public engagement with a researcher's scholarly work. Examples include: social media mentions, downloads, shares, ratings, comments, captures & exports, to name a few. Traditional citation-based metrics can take a while to produce usable data in comparison.
Altmetrics Toolkit: Provides a glossary of different type of altmetrics, and gives advice about the appropriate use of each metric, and how to choosw metrics based on the impact that one is measuring.
Altmetric Aggregators: tools that aggregate altmetric data to make keeping track of them easy for researchers.
There are astonishing number of predatory journals and also what are called hijacked journals, which are web versions of legitimate journals which do not actually have websites. This is a list of the archived titles of predatory journals. NOTE: this list has received criticism for unwarranted negativity towards open access journals.
Select publishers have used the open access movement as a cover for taking advantage of scholars, especially early career researchers, to make a profit. To protect yourself from publishing scams, be skeptical when
In general, when you encounter a journal you're unfamiliar with, always take the time to investigate its legitimacy before choosing to submit your manuscript for review.
Rele, Shilpa; Kennedy, Marie; and Blas, Nataly, "Journal Evaluation Tool" (2017). LMU Librarian Publications & Presentations. 40.
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