It is not uncommon, especially in Europe, for funding agencies to require their grantees to publish their research findings in journals that will make the resulting articles openly-available to all immediately upon publication. In fact, the Cancer Moonshot program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently announced just such a policy – see this Science news article from August 2019 for details: “In departure for NIH, Cancer Moonshot requires grantees to make papers immediately free”.

This “immediately freely available” requirement is quite different than, for example, the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy which allows for a 12 month embargo period during which the article remains behind a paywall so that the publishers are able to make money from subscriptions to their most current content. Even though Open Access (OA) journals have been around for almost 20 years now, with the first OA publisher, BioMed Central being founded in 2000, selecting an open access journal to submit a manuscript to is still confusing territory for many authors, no doubt largely due to the many OA subtypes available to choose from. This recent article nicely describes the OA subtypes – see:

Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ. 2018 Feb 13;6:e4375. doi: 10.7717/peerj.4375. eCollection 2018. PubMed PMID: 29456894; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC5815332.

Two resources that authors may find useful for identifying potential journal candidates to submit their manuscripts to are PubHubs, a subscription database that the MSK Library provides access to, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a free database that indexes >13,000 journals. Both of these databases have advanced search features that include filters that the searcher can select to limit their search results to their desired OA options.

For example, in PubsHub, a database which contains information on both traditional and OA journal options, users can filter the results list by such options as whether the journal is a “Fully Open Access Journal” (versus a traditional or hybrid OA title), whether the title is indexed in PubMed/Medline, whether it is peer-reviewed, and by range of impact factor.

DOAJ, on the other hand, contains information only on OA titles. It includes such information as OA article publication cost and can be filtered by options such as peer-review status, etc.

For assistance with selecting an OA journal title to submit an article to for publication, feel free to Ask US at the MSK Library!