Research Guides: Open Access: Author Rights & Tools

Resources for Authors

SPARC Author Rights Initiative
SPARC’s Author Rights brochure identifies the rights faculty have as copyright holders and encourages you to retain the rights you need to ensure the broadest practical access to your articles. It explains how to use the SPARC Author Addendum and even gives tips on what to do if the publisher rejects the Addendum. It also offers specific language authors can insert in a publisher agreement when their article will be deposited in NIH’s PubMed Central.
Author's Rights, Tout de Suite by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.
SPARC Author Addendum
Complete this PDF form and attach to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that you retain certain rights.

Open Access Journals: Green, Gold & Hybrid

There are many types of Open Access journals, Green, Gold, and Hybid being the most frequent types. Green open access policies give authors permission to self-archive in some way, usually in an institutional repository. Gold journals provide immediate access to articles but the author or author's institution pays a fee at time of publication.

Hybrid journals are closed-access journals (journals which require subscriptions for access) that allow authors to pay fees to make their articles immediately open access. Publishers do not decrease subscription fees, however, even if author fees paid for an entire issue. this "double-dipping" gives publishers an additional revenue stream, yet subscription prices continue to rise. Hope's OA Fund cannot be used to pay author fees for a closed-access journal.

In response to the research community's expressed desire for OA, journal publishers continue to update their policies, with over 80% allowing some form of self-archiving (green OA).

(Harnad, S., T. Brody, F. Vallieres, L. Carr, S. Hitchcock, Y. Gingras, C. Oppenheim, C. Hajjem, and E. Hilf. "The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access: An Update." Serials Review 34.1 (2008): 36-40. Web.)

Gold Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) This link opens in a new window
Subject: Interdisciplinary
Content/Description: Provides open access to peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles covering a wide range of subjects.

BioMed Central - The Open Access Publisher
Publisher of over 300 peer-reviewed open access journals.
Open Libraries of Humanities
The OLH is a not-for-profit enterprise with the sole mission of advancing open access to scholarship in the humanities.
Public Library of Science
PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. It contains seven online peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals.

Open Policy Finder

Open Policy Finder (Jisc) is a database that includes information on publisher permissions concerning open access, copyright, the sharing of publications, and the deposit of publications into institutional repositories. You can search by journal title or by publisher to determine what a publisher will allow.

Evaluating Open Access Journals

When selecting a high-quality open access journal for your research, a good rule of thumb is to make sure that any journal you select is indexed in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). Additional evaluation tools are listed below:

Journal Evaluation Tool
Loyola Marymount University librarians Shilpa Rele, Marie Kennedy, and Nataly Blas have created a helpful rubric for evaluating journals. This PDF download from the LMU institutional repository includes steps for evaluating journals, a detailed rubric of criteria, and a scoring table to accompany the rubric.
Retraction Watch Hijacked Journals Checker
A tracking spreadsheet that lists hijacked journals. Hijacked journals mirror legitimate journals without permission from the original journal.
Retraction Watch Database
A relied-upon information source of publication retraction data. You can easily see why papers were retracted via their "reasons" index. Some reference management software have integrated Retraction Watch Database data to give retraction alerts in your reference lists; including EndNote and Zotero.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank
SJR is a prestige metric based on the methodology inspired by the Google PageRank algorithm. With SJR, the discipline, quality, and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation and the impact that journal makes. This metric is based on citation data from the Scopus database. The average SJR is now equal to 1, which means that journals with SJRs higher than 1 are more prestigious than average.