Research Guides: Open Access Publishing: Where to Publish OA

Open Access Journals

There are many discipline-specific as well as multi-disciplinary open access journals. Choose journals for publication carefully; see Vetting OA Journals for more information or contact your library liaison for help.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A searchable directory of OA journals across all disciplines.
International Association for Media and Communication OA
A list of OA journals in the field of media and communications research.
Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched works with libraries and academic publishers to make selected books openly accessible. The model depends on libraries contributing to cover a publisher's costs on a book; when the cost-recovery goal is met, the book becomes open access. Knowledge Unlatched encourages authors to discuss this option with their publishers.
MediaCommons Press
An "in-development feature of promoting the digital publication of texts in the field of media studies, ranging from article- to monograph-length.”
MLA Commons
A network linking members of the Modern Language Association. MLA Commons, in addition to supporting a wide range of informal blogs and discussion groups, offers a robust platform for more formal publications, both member-generated and those initiated by the association.
Open Humanities Press
An "international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide." The OHP network includes several openly accessible book series published by MPublishing at the University of Michigan, as well as a selective list of autonomously-produced open access journals in critical and cultural theory.
Open Library of Humanities
A high-profile initiative to establish a non-profit open access publisher for the humanities and social sciences. See this April 2014 CHE interview with Martin Paul Eve, Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK and co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities.
PeerJ
An off-shoot of PLoS, PeerJ is an OA journal in the biological and medical sciences and has a unique publishing fee model, which includes lifetime membership options.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
A well-established collection of OA, peer-reviewed journals covering an array of disciplines in the sciences including PLOS Biology, PLOS One, and PLOS Pathogens.

Open Access Repositories

Depositing your work in an open access repository is another way to share your research. Be careful to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions when uploading your published work (see Know your Copyrights). Repositories may be institutional, like EKU's Encompass, or discipline-specific.

PubMed Central
PubMed Central is a full-text, open access database (to be distinguished from PubMed which is a citation database) administered by the National Library of Medicine. Depending on publishers' policies, authors can submit published articles for inclusion and are required to do so in the case of NIH-funded research.
OpenDOAR
Directory of Open Access Repositories. This directory provides a searchable database of academic open access repositories. Here you can search either for repositories or for repository content.
Cogprints
Cogprints is an open access repository for literature in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science and numerous other scientific disciplines. Authors can submit preprints or other published works.
BioRxiv
Modeled after ArXiv, the well-known physics pre-print repository, this brand new disciplinary repository operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is a pre-print archive for the biological sciences. Submissions should be made indirectly via exports from institutional repositories like eCommons.

Where to Deposit Data for Open Access

Data sharing is increasingly important in research and now often mandated by funding agencies. There are many discipline-specific data repositories, many of which are open access. Here are some resources for finding open access repositories in which to deposit your datasets:

Encompass: deposit your pre-prints; you can also attach your original data files. Ask us if you need help with this or have questions.
re3data promotes a culture of sharing, increased access and better visibility of research data its global registry of research data repositories.
Dryad is a data-sharing initiative that partners with publishers to host research data underlying scientific and medical publications.

New Forms of Scholarly Publishing

Increasingly, researchers are sharing their work in non-traditional ways online. Here is a list of some online venues for new forms of scholarly communication.

SlideShare
A free online tool for uploading and sharing slide presentations. The number of downloads of your slides can be tracked and used as an alternative measure of research impact.
Figshare
Provides free, unlimited public space to upload files in any format to be visualized in a browser. Share such research products as figures, datasets, posters and presentations.
X (formerly Twitter)
Twitter can be used to share links and short messages with a large online community. Twitter is increasingly being used as a communication tool within research communities and as a tool to connect with potential collaborators at professional conferences and meetings.
Vimeo
Vimeo is a free online service for sharing and uploading video content.
WordPress
A free, easy-to-use web-based software for the creation of websites and blogs.