Open Scholarship Department

Resources for Assessing Publishers and Finding a Journal to Publish in.

Think. Check. Submit. is a campaign to help researchers identify trusted
journals for their research. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher.

Open Science Initiative Brief: Deceptive publishing

Deceptive publishing is a practice whereby a company creates a journal on false pretenses for the purposes of defrauding authors, helping authors deceive their colleagues, or both.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a trusted resource that evaluates and compares academic journals using citation data. It provides metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor to help researchers identify influential journals in their field. JCR encompasses over 22,000+ journals across 250 research categories, making it one of the most comprehensive tools for assessing scholarly impact.

Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities

Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities provides contact information, publication guidelines, and other information to help professors and students get their manuscripts published.

Considerations for Undergraduate Researchers

Anyone who presents at a conference could receive an e-mail inviting them to publish their research. Unfortunately, disreputable (predatory) publishers sometimes send unwanted e-mails to conference presenters, including undergraduate students, who are not aware of the problems caused by disreputable OA journal publishers.

Undergraduates interested in publishing their research in a journal also need to evaluate the journal to ensure that the journal, and its publisher, are reputable. There are journals that publish undergraduate research. They can be published by honor societies in a field or university presses. The links below provide information on college honor societies, some of which publish journals, and journals that publish undergraduate research.

Checking for Quality

It is important for scholars to determine the quality and reputation of the journals to which they submit their work for publication.  Just as with subscription journals, there are unscrupulous OA publishers who spam scholars via email with tempting offers to submit journal articles and/or serve on editorial boards. Read more.

Below are criteria for evaluating a specific journal, as well as links to organizations that evaluate publishers and journals.

Journal Criteria

1. Caliber of the research published.

2. Read over a few articles to assess the quality.

3. Peer review process as described on the journal's web site.

4. Consider contacting published authors about their experience.

5. Composition of the editorial board and staff.

6. Are editors recognized experts, and are their affiliations provided?

7. Ease of finding contact information for the publisher, including a street address and phone number (not just a contact form).

8. Caution that some unscrupulous publishers include a fake address or an address for a private home to deceive readers

9. Metrics of quality for the journal (i.e. impact factors, article-level metrics, or other trusted measures).

10. OA journals: Transparency of journal's policy on charging for OA publication, and the amount of the charges.

11. Copyright ownership for published content.

12. Beware of open access journals that require all copyrights to be transferred to the publisher. True OA means the author retains their copyright via a Creative Commons or comparable license.

Appraisal by the Industry

There are many organizations that vet individual journals and publishers, which may help authors assess legitimacy.
While exclusion from any of these services does not necessarily mean that a publisher is not reputable, authors may consider:

1. Is the journal indexed in PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, or other literature indexes in your field?

2. Is the journal or publisher a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)?

3. Does the journal have an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)?

4. Does the journal have an JCR impact factor, SNIP, or Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) ranking? Beware of unrecognized ranking systems, often designed to mimic existing metrics.

Additionally, if it's open access:

1. Is the journal included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or the Directory of OA Scholarly Resources (ROAD)?

2. Is the publisher a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)?

The University of Texas System policies

Intellectual Property Policy"The University of Texas System Rules and Regulations of the Board of Regents Rule: 90101"

Office of General Counsel Intellectual Property, including copyright.The University of Texas System.

Before you sign an agreement, take a moment to think about what you want to do with the work in the future. Will your publishing contract allow you to do those things?

As the author of a scholarly work, you are also the original copyright owner in that work. When it comes to how that work is reused by others (copied, distributed, etc.), you are in charge! You are free to make copies of your work and give them away, post them online in an institutional repository, or create derivatives based on the work. When you publish the work, however, this could change and you could lose the right to do some of these things freely depending on what you agree to in the publishing contract!

As an author you may face one of the following options when publishing your work:

1. Author assigns/ transfers copyright to the publisher. Historically, this has been the most common option. Many academic publishers require that an author assign his copyright in a work to the publisher. In this scenario, when you want to reuse your article, such as by making copies to give to colleagues, distributing copies to students in a class, archiving it in an online repository, or even adapting the article into a conference presentation, you will face the same limitations on reuse that you would when you need to reuse someone else’s work. You will likely need to get permission to reuse the article from the publisher unless your proposed activity qualifies for a copyright exemption, like fair use.

The law allows for the termination of transfer during a certain period after publication, in order to give authors control over their early works that they may have signed away rights to. One tool is the website RightsBack.org.

2. Author retains some rights by:

Granting exclusive licenses: Not all publishing agreements involve the complete transfer of rights. In some cases, rather than asking for a transfer of rights, a publisher may request an exclusive license to exercise specific rights. For example, if a publisher asks for the exclusive right to publish a work, the author retains his copyright ownership, but grants the publisher the exclusive right to copy and distribute the work. Since the license is “exclusive,” the author cannot grant this license to anyone else and would need to get permission from the publisher to reproduce or distribute that work. Since this is not a complete transfer of the author's copyright, it is possible for the author may retain the right to do other things with the work, such as create derivatives based on the work.

Using an “Author Addenda”: It is also possible to customize your publishing agreement using an "Author Addenda". These addenda often grant the author a non-exclusive license to reuse a work. Licenses are usually limited to specific types of activities, such as allowing a copy of an article to be uploaded to an institutional repository. A license of this type may come with additional limitations such as specifying that only a “pre-print” version of the article that can be uploaded to the repository. There are model agreements available to help authors sort out the details. (See links below.)

3. Author keeps all copyright. Complete transfers or assignments of copyright ownership and exclusive licenses are not always necessary for publication. It is possible for you to maintain ownership over your copyright and give the publisher a non-exclusive license to publish your work instead. These types of arrangements are common among open access publishers, quite often using a Creative Commons License.

Author's Alliance

Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine

SPARC Author Addenda

Contract Language and Definitions

NIH sample copyright language

More Information about licenses and copyright transfers

Many U.S. federal funding agencies require that peer-reviewed articles and research data resulting from their grants be made publicly accessible without embargo (no paywall delay). This stems from the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) guidance, "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research," which directs agencies to eliminate embargoes and ensure immediate public access to publications and supporting data.

For details on individual agency plans and requirements, visit:

• SPARC's OSTP Guidance Resources (tracks agency implementations)
• OSTP Public Access Guidance (2022 Memo)

Course Marking is the practice of designating courses that use zero-cost or low-cost course materials in the class schedule to provide transparency about the cost of required course materials.

Data Management and Sharing Plans (DMSP) are documents that researchers must outline how they plan to collect, manage, store, and share their research data from a research project. These are required by U.S. Federal institutions as part of transparency and making research data funded by the U.S. government as openly accessible as possible. See more at “Data Management and Sharing Plan”.

Open Access (OA) is the broad term for a framework that makes publications, datasets, and other research outputs openly accessible, or without encountering a barrier such as a paywall. To see the levels of Open Access publications, please see at “Green, Gold, and Diamond Access”.

Open Educational Practices include the use of OER, but also extend into practices such as non-disposable assignments and student authorship of course materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are free teaching, learning, and research materials that are openly licensed, allowing users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute content without needing to request permission from the copyright holder, as long as they follow the terms of the license.

Open Scholarship is an umbrella term that encompasses open access, open data, open educational resources, and all other forms of openness in the scholarly and research environment.

Predatory publishing: Publishing that takes advantage of the Article Processing Charge model (where authors pay fees to offset costs) to take money upfront from authors and provide little to no peer review. These journals are often entirely deceptive, claiming to represent organizations they do not represent, have journal impact factors they do not have, and claim to be indexed in places they are not. This term does not refer to other types of poor scholarly journals, such as vanity journals or websites posing as academic journals to spread disinformation. The Article Processing Charge (APC) model for Open Access publishing is a legitimate and common model, currently being promoted in Europe by cOAlition S to make grant funded scholarship immediately Open Access. An example of a properly run APC journal is PLoS ONE, and their information on fees is here: Explore our publication fees and funding for open access publishing - PLOS. Note that fees are not collected until after articles are refereed and accepted. More information on identifying predatory publishers at Identify trusted publishers for your research • Think. Check. Submit.

Predatory conferences: These conferences are similar to predatory publishers in that they take money upfront from attendees/speakers, do not represent organizations they claim to represent, and do not actually hold the promised conference. More information at Think. Check. Attend. • Think. Check. Submit.

Peer review: The review of a work by an expert on the subject. Authors may be asked to suggest reviewers when they submit their manuscript. There are a wide range of peer review models in current use, including single blind, double blind, triple blind, and open peer review. Single blind peer review, where the reviewers are not known to the author, is the most common type. Most models of peer review are prior to publication. Some newer models of peer review rely on posting pre-prints openly for wide scrutiny, and taking the openly solicited feedback into the peer review process. Others will do editorial review and then open the paper for post-peer review. Review done by an editor (editorial review) is usually considered part of peer review, but not a type of peer review.

Pre-print: A paper that has not undergone peer review. Typically this term is used in the depositing and self-archiving of pre-prints in institutional repositories.

Post-print: Also known as an author accepted manuscript (AAM). This is the post-peer reviewed version of a paper that has not yet been formatted by the journal into the publisher print. Usually these versions can also be self-archived.

Publisher print: The final version of a journal article put out by the publisher. Often this version cannot be self-archived or shared.

Research Data Management (RDM) is the broad term for the collection, organization, analysis, sharing, storage and preservation of your research data over the course of a research project. These areas are essential to the Research Data Management Lifecycle, or the stages that researchers will go through with their research project from planning to the submission of their research outputs. See more at “Research Data Management: Everything your institution needs to know”.

Self-archiving is a strategy used by authors to make their scholarly works available on the open web--to provide open access. In this context, the contents are usually journal articles, conference or technical reports, theses and dissertations, or data sets. A scholarly work is self-archived if it is posted to a personal or professional web site, deposited in an institutional repository, or contributed by the author to a disciplinary archive such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), arXiv, or PubMed Central.

Unlimited User Library Licensed ebooks (LL ebooks): These are ebooks the library can purchase for required textbooks to make them available to students at no charge. Unlimited concurrent users means there is no limit on how many users can look at the ebook at once (many other ebooks have limits of 1 or 3 users at a time). This results in a net positive in student savings even considering library cost in most situations, and can free up students to spend more on other materials or take more course hours.

The University Library supports scholars in publishing Open Access pre-prints and accepted manuscripts in order to make all UTRGV research as widely available as possible. But for that extra discoverability, below are tools and platforms that can help connect you to other scholars in your field, and define how your research appears on the open web (such has in Google Scholar or ORCID profiles). 

ORCID

• ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.

Google Scholar Profiles

• Google Scholar Profiles provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., Richard Feynman.
• Best of all, it's quick to set up and simple to maintain - even if you have written hundreds of articles, and even if your name is shared by several different scholars. You can add groups of related articles, not just one article at a time; and your citation metrics are computed and updated automatically as Google Scholar finds new citations to your work on the web. You can choose to have your list of articles updated automatically or review the updates yourself, or to manually update your articles at any time.

Clarivate ResearcherID

• Register on Publons and import your Web of Science publications to become eligible for a Web of Science ResearcherID.
• Each night, Publons assigns a Web of Science ResearcherID to any profiles with one or more Web of Science Core Collection-indexed publications that do not yet have a ResearcherID.
• Any publications you add to your Publons profile will then be linked to your Web of Science ResearcherID when anyone searches for you on Web of Science. Please allow up to two weeks for changes you make on Publons to be reflected on Web of Science.

Data Management Plans

A Data Management Plan (DMP) describes data that will be acquired or produced during research; how the data will be managed, described, and stored, what standards you will use, and how data will be handled and protected during and after the completion of the project.

- USGS Data Management Plans

Data Repositories

ScholarWorks @ UTRGV

• ScholarWorks @ UTRGV is the institutional repository hosted by the library. It hosts articles, primary sources, digital collections, theses, and datasets. 

Zenodo

• Zenodo helps researchers receive credit by making the research results citable and through OpenAIRE integrates them into existing reporting lines to funding agencies like the European Commission. Citation information is also passed to DataCite and onto the scholarly aggregators.
• Recommended for its ability to version datasets and generous upload limits.

Figshare

• Upload files up to 5GB. We accept any file format and aim to preview all of them in the browser. Useful for its visualization functions.

Open Science Framework (OSF)

• OSF is a free, open source web application that connects and supports the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use OSF to collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data. OSF is the flagship product of the non-profit Center for Open Science.

Google Dataset Search

• Datasets put into the above repositories and others will often appear in the Google Dataset search. 

Metrics Toolkit

• The Metrics Toolkit is a resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact. With the Toolkit you can quickly understand what a metric means, how it is calculated, and if it’s good match for your impact question.