Academic Publishing and Impact: Publishing Research

If you are an Early Career Researcher, Postgraduate Researcher or looking for the first time at research publishing, there's some difficulty in choosing which route to use.

• Do you go for the Open Access route to maximise exposure, how do you find the money for Gold Open Access?
• Do you go for the traditional subscription model, which may limit your potential readership to academia but is less accessible?
• What about the journals, some journals only allow one route, some are subscription only, but an increasing number are Gold Open Access only, so where can you publish?

Here are a few tips:

• Use the Swansea University Research Publications Policy to self-archive your author accepted manuscript (AAM) in our repository, Cronfa. You are legally permitted to release the AAM document at first online publication with no publisher embargo and a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution 4.0 licence. This applies to specific output types.
• Check your funder requirements and see if there is provision for publication costs via our Publisher Open Access Agreements page or via the UKRI Open Access Block Grant or a Faculty fund.

And finally, ask us. Whether it's checking what kind of journal you want to submit to, looking at your options email the team: libraryresearchsupport@swansea.ac.uk 

For help or advice with any Open Research, Open Access or Repository query contact the Research Support Team by email. Research data queries should be directed to the Research Data Support Team.

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But what's wrong with this?

1. It's perfectly possible for a researcher in a university to be unable to read their own work if their library doesn't subscribe to the journal

2. People outside of the university are the taxpayers who fund a lot of the research​, are unable to read the outcome of the research they fund.

3. Is the university really a ‘public good’ if the research it produces is not accessible to the vast majority of people?

4. For the researcher, they are giving their intellectual property, and hard work away for free. A tick box is often built into journal submission platforms which gives your copyright to the publisher, which you must tick to proceed with the submission

'Open Access Publishing' is a phrase you will encounter and is increasingly mainstream as a publishing mechanism. Open Access is mandatory for many funding bodies, organisations, and research assessment exercises like the REF.

‘Open access (OA) refers to free, unrestricted online access to research outputs such as journal articles and books. OA content is open to all, with no access fees’ 

There is evidence that publishing Open Access does increase the rate at which your work is cited. The more people who can access your work, the more people are able to cite it.  There are different types of Open Access including Gold, Green, Diamond, which you can read more about here

 OA addresses several problems of the traditional model:

1. If an article is open access anyone with an internet connection can read it for free without a encountering a paywall.

2. Gold open access, and some green routes, enable researchers to retain their copyright over their work. 

However;  There are often costs associated to publishing Open Access which can make it difficult to do as an unfunded researcher, Postgraduate or Early Career Researcher. You can find out how the Library supports researchers by checking the Publisher Open Access Agreements webpage.

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.