Where to Publish and Author Rights

UCF Graduate Student CenterNovember 2014

Penny Beile, Ph.D., Associate Director, UCF Libraries

Objectives• Identify and prioritize publishing criteria

• Find, evaluate and compare potential publication venues

• Explore alternative publishing options

• Understand basic copyright concepts related to publishing your work

Start the conversation…• Introductions – name, degree, program• Who has published? Who’s writing for publication? Who plans on publishing?

• Where (or what) did you publish?• What venues/formats do you typically publish in?• Do you know if there a list of core journals or presses in your field? Do you know which journals are first tier, second tier, etc? And what level is acceptable?

• What criteria did you use to determine where you were going to submit your work?

• Has anyone deposited a publication in a repository, like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or a subject repository?

Criteria to consider…

o Talk to your department chair and promotion committee, find faculty mentors

o Check current P/T guidelines of the department or college

o Identify a core journal list or other ‘appropriate’ dissemination venues (the literature, WOS, GS)

o Review dept or college Annual Reports or search databases to see where other faculty have published (can change)

• Departmental expectations (always paramount!)

Criteria to consider cont’d…

Identify target audience:o Scholar focused or practitioner focusedo Specialization?

Identify potential journals based on scope:o Once identified, think about journals audience reads, or which journals cited works appeared

o Conduct a database search with keywords related to the manuscript or research idea

o Where are the journals on the core list? Do they count for promotion and/or tenure?

o Is the quality of the work congruent with the quality of the journal?

• Audience and scope of scholarship/creative activity

Criteria to consider cont’d…

• Journal prestige and reputationo Who is the publisher? The editorial board?

o Indexingo Review processo Impact factoro Acceptance rateso Circulationo ‘Legs’

Where to find this information?o Publisher web siteso Directories (eg, Ulrich’s, Cabell’s)

o Compiled lists o Google Scholar o And, of course, JCR, WOS, Harzing’s, SCImago and other disciplinary sites

Criteria to consider cont’d…

• Last but not least, “other considerations specific to OA”

o Open Access (DOAJ and Sherpa Romeo)o Credibility of OA journals (Beall’s list and OASPA)

o Publication fees (publisher, check publisher contract/agreement)

o Copyright/author rights

Where to find this information?o DOAJ (browse by subject) http://doaj.org/, then select Search, Journals, Subject o Beall’s list of predatory publishers http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ o Sherpa Romeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ o Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association (OASPA) http://oaspa.org/ o SPARC addendum http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum o SPARC/PLOS/OASPA Open Access Spectrum http://www.plos.org/open-access/howopenisit/

Why Open Access?• Environmental

o Meets funding agency mandateso Can increase author impact (Steve Lawrence,

Nature)o Accelerates the pace of research, discovery, innovation

• Ethicalo Gets information in the hands of practitioners earlier

o Democratizes access to informationo Creates transparency; better research

• Economico Escalating cost of serial subscriptions…

Average Price per Journal by Discipline

Source: Bosch, Stephen and Kittie Henderson. “The Winds of Change: PeriodicalsPrice Survey 2013.” Library Journal 21 July 2013. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/publishing/the-winds-of-change-periodicals-price-survey-2013#_

http://www.wiu.edu/library/images/arlprices.jpg

Which would you rather have?A smoking hot 2013 Audi A3 at $26,986?

Or a subscription to the Journal of Comparative Neurology at $30,860?

Author Rights

• You own copyright until you give it away• Publication agreements are a bundle of rights• Read your agreement!!• Know that you can try to negotiate to retain some rights– Reuse charts and graphs or reproduce the work– Give copies to your colleagues or students– Post on a website (Academia.edu or ResearchGate) or repository

• SPARC Author Addendum http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum

• Check SherpaRomeo for publisher copyright policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PDFandIR.html

UCF Libraries does not give copyright advice, but we can alert authors about their rights and point them to resources for negotiating them. For copyright advice, go to the Office of General Counsel

UCF Libraries Research Lifecycle