Open Access: Open Access Publishing

CUHK is committed to open access as a means of broadening access to scholarly materials. The percentage of Gold OA publications by CUHK researchers has increased from 5% to 28% during the period 2010-2020.

Source:InCites

When you are looking for OA journals to publish your research, please evaluate the quality of the journals and avoid predatory journals. As OA publishing becomes more common, there are many high-quality OA journals available in different subject areas.

Predatory journals are not legitimate academic journals and do not provide a peer-review process to evaluate and improve the quality of manuscripts. They publish whatever they receive and charge authors publication fees merely for profits.

To choose legitimate OA journals, you may consider the following points:

• Is the journal indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals?

• Is the journal indexed in established databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, or the ones in your subject area?

• Does the journal provide a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for all articles?

• Does the journal have an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)?

• Does the journal clearly state the OA fees and licenses?

• Is the journal affiliated with a reputable research institute or scientific society?

• Are the editorial members well-known researchers or affiliated with reputable institutions?

• Is the publisher well known in your research field?

• Is the publisher a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association?

You may also visit Think. Check. Submit. for more tools and resources on choosing journals.

Adapted from Quality issues concerning open access journals by Open Access.nl         

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes open access peer-review journals.

• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is an online directory that indexes open access books.

• Manuscript Matchers help you find the right journals for your manuscript. Notes will be provided along the steps to highlight how to discern whether a journal offers an open access option.

• Journal Citation Reports offers journal lists by research areas. You may apply an open access filter to narrow down the result. 

• Scopus offers journal lists by research areas. You may apply an open access filter to narrow down the result. 

If you want to deposit your research data for Open Access, please refer to the Dataset Deposit Guide.