Open Access Publishing
McMaster Library supports Open Access Publishing (OA) and is happy to assist faculty and students that are interested in making their work freely available.
- You can adhere to the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications in one of two ways:
- "Submit your manuscript to a journal that offers immediate open access or offers open access to the paper on its website within 12 months of publication."
- "Submit your manuscript to a journal that does not offer open access, but will permit you to archive the peer-reviewed manuscript in a central or institutional repository within 12 months of publication."
- Final peer-reviewed version of your work will be openly available on the publisher's website and discoverable wherever the publisher has indexed it leading to:
- increased interaction resulting in increased number of views and citations
- improved education and public access
- Use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to browse journals connected to your research interests.
- Search for Open Access Journals using search engines and evaluate by considering:
- are articles from this journal being cited in other reputable journals?
- are reputable authors being published in this journal?
The development of Open Access Publishing has seen the rise of predatory journals that seek to exploit the OA model. The primary goal of these journals is to make a profit by engaging in questionable editorial and publishing practices.
A Predatory Journal may:
- appear as unsolicited spam from a non academic email account and include a lot of spelling and grammatical errors
- not provide the name of their editors or editorial board
- not provide an address or give a fake address
- promise rapid publication (i.e. little or no peer review)
- make false claims (i.e. regarding impact factor and indexing)
- advertise special offers (i.e. reduced fees or limited time discounts)
Although outdated, the archived Beall's List of Potential Predatory Journals and Publishers is one resource for determining whether a publication is predatory.
Resources for Assessing Journals:
- Follow Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) guidelines for assessing journals.
- See the McMaster University, How to Avoid Predatory Publishers and Conferences guide and checklist.
