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You might have often heard the group of words “open access journal publishing” if you are related to the education or research field. Nowadays, people talk about the free resources for knowledge as the Internet makes the normal human being very addicted to knowing something new. Earlier, the knowledgeable contents were not free to access, but now people understand the power of making this content free for the general population.

These opening remarks lead us to the question: How can we answer the question? What is open access journal publishing? or what is an open-access journal? So, tighten your seatbelt; I will take you on a ride in the deep sea of the open-access world.

So, What is Open Access?

Anything which doesn’t require any prior permission, license, subscription, or fee payment is called open access. In simple language, the content which is open access is free to consume. In other words, you can say that it is a way of conveying information (in digital form) free of cost via the Internet.

For example, when you surf the Internet for knowledge hunting, you find two kinds of web pages. The first type may ask for a payment, some authentication, or a subscription to allow you to access the content. The second type doesn’t ask for fees or a subscription but directly allows you to access the content. The latter type is called open-access content.

Open-access word is much more prevalent in research publications or scholarly literature. The scholarly articles are open access and can be accessed without any payment over the Internet. The primary form factor of open-access content is digital, which is accessible on the Internet. The subsequent section will focus on the purpose of open access, which will clarify your understanding.

What is the purpose of open access journal publishing?

The primary purpose of open access journal publishing is to maximize the availability of research documentation, usually in research articles, book reviews, book chapters, or recorded communication regarding novel fact findings. The idea of open access journal publishing has erupted from the matured understandings which emphasize the belief that knowledge gained from public efforts must be freely accessible. It will not be cliche to say that publishing open-access content is a noble cause and indirectly affects millions.

What are the types of open access journal publishing or mode of open access journal publishing?

It has been divided into three categories. Each has been explained below;

Green Open Access

This mode of open access is closely coupled with the author’s intention. Intention means; whether authors are willing to put/archive their accepted research article(s) to their institutional repositories or other open-access sites. This arrangement empowers the authors to make the last version of their research paper available, even though it has been published in subscription-based journals.

Gold Open Access

This mode may give you a setback after knowing that it involves some form of cost to authors for open publishing access. However, this may provide immediate online access to the published article on the publisher’s website. Publishers following this mode demand payment as processing charges. In this mode, the author must assign the publishers a copyright.

Hybrid Open Access

This mode involves the working principle from the above-discussed categories. An author can put their contents in open-access journals for availing to other readers.

I think you are well aware of “open access.” So, without wasting much time, let’s jump into the core part of this blog, which is all about open-access journals & open-access journal publishing.

What is an open-access journal?

Don’t expect any contradictory definition of the real meaning of open access. To define this term, rewrite the term as “open access to the journal.” You will have the definition automatically by putting the meaning of open access in the first place and the meaning of journal in the second place. Still, if you are confused, read the paragraph below for the exact words.

Definition of open access journal: Journals (collections of well-formatted and expert-reviewed research articles written by academics, research scholars, industry experts, or professors) that do not require any prerequisite (in the form of paid subscription or license) for accessing the inside articles are called open-access journals or open access journal publishing

Journals having open access are not just free to read. Instead, the contents of such journals are also immune from most copyright and licensing restrictions. Anyone can have the reference of these articles for their future works.

Open access journal publishing contents are open to all research communities and normal human beings. You are not required to purchase a subscription or any special license to access the published research articles in such journals. The most beautiful thing about these categories of journals is that they are “free.”

open access journal publishing contents were not very popular as there were no dedicated online infrastructures. Journals were in print form only. However, after the entrance of the Internet, many publishers have developed open access journal publishing websites. open access journal publishing contents can be accessed by anyone having a good internet connection. So, you might be clear now that this is a very generous arrangement to accelerate the research and development by subtracting the cost hurdles.

Recently, research funding agencies (mainly controlled by the national administration) are compressing researchers to make their findings open because the funding received from tax money should be reverted with positive outcomes.

What is the purpose of open access journal?

Researchers from many countries across the globe do not have the same financial support to afford the high subscription rates of closed-access journals. Due to this limitation, many good research scholars find it difficult to access others’ scholarly content and their relevant fields’ novel findings. In the research world, the word “reference” matters a lot. By referring to others’ research work, researchers can get handsome help in their tasks.

To overcome the above-cited problem, open access journal publishing has emerged. This journal believes that knowledge derived from public funding must be freely accessible to all researchers. The other reason open access journal publishing gained popularity is that publicly funded research works become very easy to access. The statement, as mentioned earlier, makes them more likely to be downloaded, read, and cited.

What is the importance of open access journal publishing?

What we are today is only and only due to research, directly or indirectly—for example, our great fathers used to eat raw meat for survival. Still, eventually, medical science evolved, and via rigorous research/observations, we concluded that cooked stuff is way more beneficial to the human body and easy to digest. This is just a small example of the impact of research on human life. I can write a whole essay on this.

By the above discussion, there is no doubt that research is a nonneglectable part of our life to make our routine life more sustainable and prosperous. So, the journal’s open access brings this even further by allowing free access to research articles.

For most junior-level researchers, open access journal publishing allows them to take advantage of published scholarly work from experienced and expert researchers around the globe.

From the author’s point of view, an article published in open access journal publishing gets more attention from citations worldwide as it is open to all. This also works as a motivation factor for contributing more in relevant fields. Furthermore, a higher number of citations can lead to a swelling number of inter researchers’ communication, making it even more fruitful for new directions.

How can I find open access journal publishing websites?

Online directories are available to find open access journal publishing relevant to your research fields. These directories have a well-organized list of the journal with all details of volume and issues. However, make sure about the indexing status of these journals before publishing your articles. These directories will work as a one-stop solution for finding open access journal publishing websites. Famous players of this game are:

Directory of Open Access Journals >> (sometimes referred to as the open access journals directory or DOAJ.)
International Scientific Indexing >>
BEALL’S LIST >> (List of Publishers)
Hindawi Publication >>

What are the open-access journals which have no publication fee for authors?

Finding an open-access journal that publishes the article for free is very tough and time-consuming. However, you may find such open-access journals via ISI . In ISI, you will have all journals’ categories. First, select the journals of your concern field and get the publisher details. Then, insert this publisher detail in BEALL’S LIST . While researching this type of journal, please read the authors’ section carefully. By this methodology, you might find a journal that accepts free publication.

One another way to find such journals is to visit the directory of open-access journals; You can follow below given steps:

Go to DOAJ
Enter your discipline or keywords in the Search box to search for journal titles.
On the results page, choose “Without article processing charges (APCs)” on the left.

Who can start open-access journal publishing?

Any individual, institution, organization, NGO, national body, group of individuals or academician can start their open-access journal. There are no such difficult criteria to the full fill as a prerequisite for establishing the new open-access journals. The only requirement is that you have will power to start it; resources needed for the journal will be automatically prompted in front of you.

Would you like to start your own journal? Click here to make your journal website live in 2 weeks.

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What is the process of starting a new open-access journal?

To start a new open-access journal, you need basic things, which I have listed below in a step-by-step manner. If you acquire all these details well in advance, then any journal hosting service provider can establish your journal in 2-3 weeks. However, ISSN and indexing can take much time, depending upon which country you are in. So read each step carefully.

Steps for open access journal publishing Setup

Finding out the name of the journal and the area of research.
Obtain the ISSN for the journal.
Find an excellent editorial team.
Automated website with SMS, email support, and online publication.
Define all policies about an open journal system.
Licensing and indexing open journal system.
Advertise your journal.

Is there any open-source platform for open-access journals?

One world-renowned open-source platform is the “open journal system (OJS).” This platform allows anyone to start their journal website with readily available journal architecture and workflow. This platform already hosts more than 25000 open access journals. So, if you host your journal on this platform, you will get free popularity along with the overall workflow per the guidelines of leading indexing agencies like SCOPUS.

OJS allows us to manage, review, and organize all scientific content for later publication. Everything is handled by an editor located in servers to manage the contents better. It is also a system that helps to train people so that they can step by step assemble their journals in a very professional way. This is also important if you consider all the guidelines by Scopus and WOS. All these are the protocols to follow to take a scientific journal from 0 to publication and its ISSN.

What if I don’t know about the journal website development on OJS?

Don’t worry; all the researchers need not know the website development technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. Researchers from non-IT backgrounds may find this task difficult.

To overcome the above-cited problem, you may hire a tech company with expertise in open journal system (OJS) hosting and setup. However, you need to pay the relevant remuneration. In addition, these service providers often offer fully customized OJS themes, which can make your journal website stand out from the crowd. On the contrary, you need to pay hefty charges for these add-ons. If you are not ready to pay an additional amount, you can go for the default OJS themes.

Conclusion:

To summarize, I would say that the open-access movement is a blessing for the research community worldwide. Publishing your article in open-access journals can attract more attention from other researchers. All in all, open-access journals can contribute a lot to improving human life. In my opinion, all academicians should start their journals alone or in a group.

It would be better to start with the basic analogy to explain the importance of journal indexing.

“There are so many car manufacturers that exist in this world and they all say that their products are better in material quality and safety. So, Customers have no clue about the reality. In this situation, independent agencies like NCAP, SAE, ARAI, etc. come into the picture to analyze each manufacturer’s products against their claim and release a report for the general population, which indeed helps the potential buyer to decide whether he/she should choose this car or not?”

The same thing is also applicable to online journals. As you know there are so many online journals out there and they all claim that they are best in their corresponding fields.

Now when it comes to selecting a journal to publish his/her research articles, the researcher may go into a dilemma. Researchers might get confused about choosing an appropriate publisher’s online journal for their invaluable research work. At this stage, the journal indexing comes to play the role of an independent referee to see if the claim made by the journal’s publisher is right or wrong.

So, What is journal indexing? (Let’s hit the bull’s eye)

Journal indexing is the conceptual measurement instrument, which measures the degree of goodness of an online journal. Basically, it sets certain standards and quality parameters for a journal to pass. The journal which surpasses the decided thresholds for qualifying can be called an “indexed journal(s)”. A journal index is also termed a ‘bibliographic database’ or ‘bibliographic index’

It is a well-organized list of journals, which is made based on a few considerations such as discipline, subject, region, and many more. Eventually, it can be used by the general public or research scholars to find concerning information on certain areas.

Index journals don’t only help to search the content but also attract many research scholars around the globe to publish their work in indexed online journals, as it makes the researcher’s research work impactful and visible.

What criteria are important for any journal to get indexed?

Online journals or online open-access journals are gone under a rigorous homologation process to make sure that they fulfill certain criteria. All indexing agencies have their own set of judging parameters, but few are very basic for all. They are given below

Ethics and peer review policies
Assessment criteria for submitted articles
Editorial board transparency
An International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
An established publishing schedule.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs).
Copyright requirements.

How to index your open-access journal? What are the types of indexing agencies?

There are basically 2 types of indexing agencies:

(1) Public Indexing like Google Scholar

It is a popular scholarly indexing engine that crawls the web looking for scholarly publications: articles, books, reports, theses, conference proceedings, and preprints, among others. Google scholar identifies scholarly content, determines each item’s bibliographic metadata, and groups different online versions of an item together with this metadata in search results.

There is no need to register your journal with Google Scholar. Google Scholar will eventually find and automatically crawl the site. If you notice that your journal is not appearing in Google Scholar, there may be some issues that need to be addressed. You can find more details about it on Google scholar’s official website.

(2) Private Indexing Like Scopus, PubMed, EBSCO, etc.

For your journal to enter a reputed journal indexing agency, you need to apply for the relevant firm. Upon receiving the request for indexing, the indexation team (often referred to as auditors) will pass your journal through the earlier discussed parameters. Auditors will crosscheck information such as;

A full listing of the editorial board on the website
The inclusion of ethics statements in published articles
Established appeal and retraction processes

Indexed journal vs non-indexed journal? What is the importance of journal indexing?

As a researcher, you always want your research work to shout for itself as much as possible. At the same time, you also want it to be credible for other researchers along with normal knowledge seekers, online as well as offline. So, as discussed at the beginning of this blog, it is good for any journal that someone else (indexing agencies) speaks for its quality. Such a mechanism makes them credible. Eventually, researchers’ published articles in an indexed journal get much better attention than in a non-indexed journal. Ultimately, for any researcher, the main objective is, to have more citations.

Organizations and research institutes are always insisting their staff/students publish corresponding research work in reputed journals which are indexed. Hence, the index of the journal becomes an important milestone for graduation/promotion/grant funding.

Why Journal Indexing is important for Open Access Journal?

In the world of research, publication trends are now shifting towards open-access journals, which means these journals are not required to be subscribed to on a monthly/yearly basis. Instead, anyone can access them online. Observing the widely accepted trend in the research publication field such open-access journals keep on erupting on day to day basis.

Reasons for the popularity of open-access journals:

High visibility. Anyone can access and read your paper.
Publication speed. It is generally quicker to post an article online than to publish it in a traditional journal format.

Open access platform is good for the easy access point of view but at the same time, they also open the gates for so many unethical practitioners and bad guys, whose primary intention to establish the journal is to “earn money”. The such journal publishes the researchers’ articles without any kind of peer review process. Moreover, they do not check for plagiarism and committee copyright violations.

For new researchers, journal indexing plays a vital role because it is very tough to identify which is good and which one is bad. They just put their hard-earned money into publishing, and in the end, they get a very poor result. Journal indexing is necessary in pulling out the best quality open-access journals from a pile of available journals in the ocean of the world wide web.

How to identify whether the open-access journal is indexed or not?

If an online open-access journal is indexed by any reputed agencies, they must include logos of such agencies on their websites. However, in many cases, it has been observed that low-quality journals are putting the logos of indexing agencies on their websites without any kind of authorization to show the affiliation. Journal indexing is always termed as a thing to showcase not to hide so journal indexing is very easy to find if it is available.

In this situation, it would be always advisable to check the journal indexing status on the corresponding “Indexing Agencies official website” by inserting the journal’s name or ISSN number. You can find journal indexing using this way also.

What is the difference between journal indexing and impact factors of journals? Index of vs Impact Factor

By the shallow observation, you might reach the conclusion that both the things are same as they both recite something about the quality of the journal. However, technically both terms are not the same. It is very obvious that indexed journals in reputed international databases will have always a better and higher value of impact factor than the non-indexed.

It is very important to know that many reputed journals do not have an impact factor even though they are indexed. By this deep observation, we can say that the impact factor is not the compulsory parameter to judge the quality of any journal. We can say that the impact factor is not the only sufficient parameter to judge the quality of a journal. It makes sense when it is coupled with indexing.

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Conclusion

To conclude I would say, that journal indexing plays a very important role in assessing the quality of the journal. In the era of online open-access journals, where researchers have so many options to publish. In such a situation, indexing can avoid confusion about where to publish his/her research article.

for the publishers/promoters of the journal, it is always good to be indexed with reputed and worldwide accepted journal indexing agencies like DOAJ, SCOPUS, WOS, etc. on the other hand, for researchers it is always advisable to publish in indexed journals rather than non-indexed because former will make the research work more valuable and visible.