This guide presents essential channels for open access publishing—journals, monographs, and repositories—along with tools to evaluate their credibility. It also offers "Think. Check. Submit." checklist to help you make informed publishing decisions, complemented by information on licensing, copyright, and article processing charges (APCs).
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides an index to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. Additionally, most traditional publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer also provide open access options.
Discipline or subject repositories are online archives designed to preserve, organize, and disseminate research. Material is deposited by researchers to be freely accessible and cited with limited restrictions.
Institutional repositories are digital collections managed by a university or research organization. Institutional repositories serve a variety of valuable roles, including supporting open access through collecting and sharing an institution's scholarly output. UH's Digital Repository supports open access and the university's scholars, allowing for the discovery of the creative and scholarly output of the University of Houston.
Whether publishing in a traditional or open access journal, it is important to carefully evaluate the credibility of the publisher and the journal. See Evaluating Publishing Options or consult this simple checklist of Think! Check! Submit!.
Open Access often uses Creative Commons (CC) licenses to clearly communicate how others can reuse your work. These licenses empower authors to retain rights while enabling broad reuse and discoverability.
Common licenses include:
CC BY (Attribution): Allows full reuse, even commercially, as long as credit is given. Often required by funders.
CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial): Allows reuse for non-commercial purposes only.
Publishers only need a license to publish, not your full copyright. By negotiating your publishing agreements you can retain more of your rights as an author.
Open access publishing increases the visibility and accessibility of scholarly work, but it can come with challenges—especially the cost of Article Processing Charges (APCs). These fees often required by publishers to cover publishing expenses and can be a significant barrier for authors without grant or institutional support. While many open access journals rely on APCs, others are supported by institutions or sponsors and may offer free publishing or waivers for those in need.
The University of Houston (UH) does not currently have a centralized fund to offset article processing charges for its community members. However, the UH Libraries offer infrastructure for the free and open dissemination of all kinds of research outputs. The Libraries also provide opportunities for authors to offset the costs of publishing in certain open access journals. For more details on APCs at UH, please visit the Open Access webpage.
Jisc Open policy finder, a public database of scholarly publishers' policies on copyright and self-archiving, offers an extensive, curated list of Open Access journals and their author processing charges (APCs).
“Predatory” publishing refers to exploitative journals that charge APCs without providing standard editorial services (e.g., peer review, indexing, archiving). These journals may:
Before submitting your work, verify journal credibility: