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Scholarly Publishing Guide

Information to help faculty and students decide how to disseminate their research and track their impact

What is Open Access?

  • Open Access refers to scholarly resources made freely and immediately available via the Internet; usually with minimal restrictions on reuse 
  • Open Access = higher citations – either via journal publishing or article archiving online
    • The Open Access Citation Advantage: studies demonstrating higher citation counts for Open Access articles
    • Open Access Citation Advantage is correlated with quality, just as citations are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations)
  • Open Access comes in two flavours:
    • Gold – immediate publication in an Open Access journal
    • Green – material made openly available via an online archive; deposit may be immediate or delayed

Open Access journals

Open Access journals comprise a rapidly growing portion of the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles published around the globe. 

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the best way to find Open Access journals. You can search by keyword, subject, language, country, processing charges*, and copyright licensing e.g. CC-BY.

We can help you develop an Open Access journal to showcase your research!

*Publishing is not free: there are costs for journal hosting, copy-editing, production, etc. Some Open Access journals charge article processing fees to cover these costs, while others operate on different business models which do not charge authors to publish.

Open Access repositories

Repositories are online archives which collect, preserve and disseminate research outputs such as articles, working papers, theses and dissertations in digital format. Repository contents are usually openly accessible for anyone around the globe.

Repositories can focus on collecting work around a specific scholarly discipline, such as arXiv, a popular physics repository.

Many institutions, including Brock University, provide institutional repositories to showcase the work of their scholars.

  • Brock Digital Repository 
    • Research produced by our scholars is visible to the world
    • Contents are Indexed in Google Scholar, SuperSearch, etc.
    • Search for content by: Keyword, Communities and collections e.g. Brock University Publications and Manuscripts, Subjects, Authors, Titles
  • OpenDOAR is a global directory of Open Access repositories 
    • Use OpenDOAR to find repositories and access their contents.
    • Search repository contents with keywords e.g. sport management – to find institutional repository contents related to your topic