Choosing publication channels

Experiences among colleagues

An important step when choosing a publication channel is to find out what its reputation is like among your colleagues, within your research field or in any desired target groups beyond your own discipline.

• Is it a journal or conference publication that your colleagues know about, publish in, and read or cite?
• Is it issued by a familiar publisher?
• What experiences do colleagues have of the peer review process?
• How easy is it to get any questions answered?
• How fast is the publishing process?
• What services are provided by the journal or publisher, for example in terms of copy editing and comments from the editor?

Target group

Research publications can be aimed at different target groups. Beyond other researchers within the field, potential readers may include, for example, students, professionals, or researchers within other disciplines. In part, this is discipline-dependent; scholars in some fields often write with professionals or an interested general audience in mind, even when colleagues in the same field are the main target audience. In other disciplines, this is less common.

A chosen target group might influence any choices you make about language, genre, and accessibility of the text. Topic and intended target group are other possible sources of influence, whether you are aiming for a broad, multidisciplinary journal, a journal covering a discipline other than your own, a specialized journal, or perhaps a smaller journal with a specific circle of readers.

Research can also be communicated through channels with target groups beyond the professionals of the field. Such channels include educational materials and popular science publications.

Language

The issue of language choice may be related to the target group but does not have to be. Within some disciplines, all scientific publications are written in English. For other disciplines, language can be a factor that influences the choice of publication channel or publisher. Sometimes certain choices need to be made before the actual writing begins.

Publishing in Swedish (or other minor languages) will limit the potential audience, and the distribution of the text in, for example, various databases. On the other hand, opting to write in Swedish can increase the opportunity to communicate about research in Swedish, by maintaining and developing a scientific discourse. It may be easier for you as a writer to express yourself in a familiar language that you are comfortable with, and the text might be more accessible for certain target groups.

Co-publishing

For best visibility, your work may benefit from co-publishing, that is, publishing together with others. Studies show that co-authored articles are often cited more often. This is probably due to the fact that the combined networks of several authors are larger than that of a single person and that citations frequently come from authors who are in one way or another familiar with or know of a certain researcher's work.

Availability

A good way to increase a publication's availability to a large number of target groups is to publish it with open access. The university's policy for open publication states that research results should be published with open access provided that it is compatible with the aims and objectives of the research.

There are many journals that either have all their material openly available (open access) or where a publication fee covers open access to individual articles (hybrid). Open access publications can also be obtained by professionals or researchers and students at institutions of higher education, that do not have a subscription to the journal. In order for the publication to be found, it may need to be indexed by relevant search services (including Google Scholar).

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a service where you can browse for journals that do not charge an Article Processing Charge (APC). The University of Gothenburg has agreements with several publishers, meaning the university already covers part or all of the APC if the authors are associated with the university. You can see the list of journals with which the university has an agreement at the university library's website. If a journal charges a publication fee, but has no agreement with the university, your project or department might cover the fee in some cases.

Various collections of conference contributions are also made openly available. In some cases, conference contributions may be covered by the open access agreements of the university.

Books are rarely published as open access, but the numbers are increasing. Dissertations are usually published as open access; the University of Gothenburg uses the Gupea platform for this purpose. In addition, the university hosts the Kriterium platform, managing peer review of books published with open access. However, Kriterium requires the book to have a publisher responsible for the publication. The publisher may apply a publication fee or printing allowance. Other opportunities include publishing your book in one of the Acta series issued by the university. These series are often additionally published in electronic form.

• Policy for open publication (PDF in Swedish)
• Publish with open access
• DOAJ
• Journals with which the university has an agreement
• Kriterium
• Publish in an Acta-series

Publishing agreements and licenses- Creative Commons

When publishing, the author usually signs an agreement with the publisher, specifying the publisher’s rights. If the article or book is not published with open access, it may be wise to pay attention to which rights the author has regarding the text.

• Can you publish an article as part of another work of yours? For example, a doctoral thesis consisting of previously published articles, with a summary.
• Are you allowed to post any version of the publication through, for example, Gupea, Arxiv.org or Research Gate/Academia.edu? If so, where can you post it, and which version applies? Often, the version you are allowed to publish is the revised version after peer review, that has been accepted by the publisher but not processed by the publisher (accepted manuscript).
• How much time must elapse between time of publication before you are allowed to post a version of the material, the so-called embargo period?
• Are you allowed to distribute the manuscript to your students and colleagues on an individual basis?

If the publication is issued with open access, this is usually done with a license from Creative Commons. The license is a way to clearly indicate to users how they are allowed to handle the publication. It is common for the license set to be CC-BY, which means that the author(s) retain the right to be mentioned as the author(s) of the work. There is also the possibility to limit commercial reuse of the work (CC-NC) or to limit which changes may be made (CC-ND). These different requirements can be combined.

The publisher often gives the author the right to choose a CC license. Research funders can also make demands regarding which license is used.

• About Creative Commons at their website
• Jisc Open Policy finder

Distribution and ranking

Journals and conference papers are made openly accessible to increase the visibility of the articles and conference contributions, by allowing you to jump directly from a search engine result to the full-text publication. For both open access publications and those that require some form of payment, another way to increase visibility is through indexing in major databases used by researchers in a field. This may include both citation databases such as Web of science and Scopus, and subject databases such as Pubmed, Psycinfo or Eric.

If you intend to publish your work in an international journal, it may be worth investigating which databases index the journal before choosing where to send your manuscript. For conferences, there may be other reasons why you choose a particular one, for example that you expect it will have participants you want to meet, and who make up a desired audience for your presentation (a way to achieve visibility). If it is the publication from the conference that is important, it may be worth investigating whether the publication is indexed in important databases in your field.

Within certain research fields, there is a tradition of favoring journals on the basis that they are considered to have a large impact in the form of an average number of citations to their published articles. This is measured based on the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or similar measures. If this is the case in your field, you may need to consider this type of ranking in deciding where to send your manuscript.

A related tool is what is often referred to as the Norwegian List (Norwegian register for scientific journals, series, and publishers) ranking only materials held to be scientific journals and publishers, into two categories. This categorization has become important even within some faculties at the University of Gothenburg. Therefore, find out whether the publication channel you intend to send your manuscript to is on this list.

Norwegian register for scientific journals, series, and publishers

DOI

Many services that distribute, collect and rank publications in various ways base this work on the publication's digital object identifier (DOI). DOI is a way of assigning a unique identifier to, for example, an article, a conference paper or, more rarely, a book chapter - in the same way that a book can have an ISBN or a journal has an ISSN. Because of this, it may be worth investigating whether the journal to which you intend to submit your manuscript assigns articles a DOI.