LibGuides: Academic Publishing: Choosing the right journal

Open Access Journals

Bioline International This link opens in a new window
A pioneer in the provision of open access to peer reviewed bioscience journals published in developing countries.These contain timely research on public health, international development, tropical medicine, food & nutritional security & biodiversity that would not otherwise be readily available to researchers in the developed world, or even in the country of publication. Bioline is an aggregator that provides a free platform for journals who wish to participate in the global open access movement

BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. BioMed Central views open access to research as essential in order to ensure the rapid and efficient communication of research findings.

CERN Document Server This link opens in a new window
Over 800,000 bibliographic records, including 360,000 fulltext documents, of interest to people working in particle physics and related areas.
Covers preprints, articles, books, journals, photographs, and much more.
Cogprints This link opens in a new window
archive for self-archive papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science, Philosophy , Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine , Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.

DISA: Digital Innovation South Africa
Freely accessible online scholarly resource focusing on the socio-political history of South Africa, particularly the struggle for freedom during the period from 1950 to the first democratic elections in 1994, providing a wealth of material on this fascinating period of the country’s history. Much time, creative thought and debate goes into the selection of the content, and participation and input from interested persons, scholars and institutions in South Africa and overseas is encouraged

DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages
E-LIS. E-prints in Library and Information Science This link opens in a new window
E-LIS is an open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, on Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related areas
Elsevier Open access journals This link opens in a new window
All articles published in Elsevier Open Access Journals are peer reviewed and upon acceptance will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. Permitted reuse is defined by your choice of user license.
Find Articles at BNET This link opens in a new window
Search millions of articles from leading academic, industry and general interest publications.
Free Medical Journals This link opens in a new window
The Free Medical Journals Site was created to promote the free availability of full text medical journals on the Internet.
HighWire Press Free Online Full-text Articles This link opens in a new window
"HighWire Press is the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth! As of 7/18/11, we are assisting in the online publication of 2,117,523 free full-text articles"

JURN
A curated academic search-engine, indexing over 4.000 free ejournals in the arts & humanities.

Modernist Journals Project This link opens in a new window
"The Modernist Journals Project is a major resource for the study of modernism in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. Our primary mission is to produce digital editions of culturally significant magazines from around the early 20th century and make them freely available to the public on our website."
Open Science Directory This link opens in a new window
Open Science Directory contains collections of Open Access Journals (e.g. Directory of Open Access Journals) and journals in the special programs (Hinari, Agora, OARE).
Oxford Open This link opens in a new window
Oxford University Press (OUP) is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. We embrace both green and gold open access (OA) publishing to support this mission.
PLoS: Public Library of Science This link opens in a new window
PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) This link opens in a new window
Over 600,000 items, including many open access working papers and journal articles.
Sabinet Open Access Journal Collection This link opens in a new window
There is also an Open Access Journal Collection where publishers can make their Open Access journals available at no cost to users. Open Access journals are searched individually. They are also incorporated into the subject collections.
The collection currently comprises 46 South African journals, which may be searched individually, and provides immediate access to the PDF versions of 6 000+ full-text articles. Of the journals in the collection, 15 appear on the Approved South African Journals list, the ISI list, or the IBSS list. New journal titles and issues are added to the collection on an ongoing basis.
SciELO SA This link opens in a new window
The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA is South Africa’s premier open-access (free to access and free to publish) searchable full-text journal database in service of the South African research community. The database covers a selected collection of peer-reviewed South African scholarly journals and forms an integral part of the SciELO Brazil project. SciELO SA is managed by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology and endorsed by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET).

SORA: Searchable Ornithological Research Archive
SORA is an open access electronic journal archive produced jointly by the University of New Mexico, the Association of Field Ornithologists, the Cooper Ornithological Society, the American Ornithologists Union, and the Wilson Ornithological Society. The archive provides access to an extensive ornithological literature of international scope, and detailed material documenting the history of ornithology in North America over the past 120 years.

Springer Open Access This link opens in a new window
SpringerOpen includes our portfolio of over 100 peer-reviewed open access journals across all areas of science. It ranges from very specialized titles to SpringerPlus, our broad interdisciplinary open access journal that covers all disciplines.
The Free Library This link opens in a new window
News, Magazines, Newspapers, Journals, Reference Articles and Classic Books

Web of Science:SciELO Citation Index
Access to scholarly literature in sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities published in leading open access journals from Latin American, Portugal, Spain and South Africa.

Wiley Open Access This link opens in a new window
Wiley Open Access is a program of fully open access journals. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. The fully open access journals are published in collaboration with authoritative journals and societies as well as supported by internationally renowned editorial board members.

For more information

For more information, view the Scholarly Communication: Choosing the right journal page

South Africa and Africa

African Journal Archive (Sabinet)

African Journals Online (AJOL)

SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

Researchers – in addition to subscription databases – can also access high quality research via the many open access databases/platforms available. Below are a few pointers as to where researchers can find open access research content from the African Open Science Platform (AOSP) team .

Publishers & Journals (including Open Access publishers)

Academic Publishers (Social Psychology)

ACS Publications

African Journals Online (AJOL)

AIP Journals - Author Select: An Open Access Initiative

ALPSP - Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers

Association of American University Presses

Assocation of Media & Publishing

BioMed Central | Article-processing charges FAQ

Cambria Press - Innovative Publisher of Academic Research

Co-Action Publishing

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Dovepress - Journal Publication Processing Fees

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services

Emerald

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine — An Open Access Journal

Funds and Factors: APC for Open Access Journals | InTechWeb Blog

Hindawi Publishing Corporation

INASP: International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications

Integrated Publishing Association- Online open access peer reviewed journals publishers

Kluwer Academic Publishers and Springer-Verlag

List of Publishers on Journalseek

MDPI | Article Processing Charges (APC) Information and FAQ

Nature Communications - OA options

No-fee Open Access Journals for all fields (Eigenfactor Index)

OAPEN Library (OA)

Open Access options | Elsevier

Open Access Journal Finder powered by Enago

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)

Open Book Publishers

Oxford Journals | Oxford Open | Oxford Open Pricing

Palgrave Open - FAQs for Authors

PLOS

SpringerOpen | Article-processing charge

STM | International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers

Taylor & Francis

Wiley Open Access

Open Research Central

Open Research Central is a not-for-profit organisation created to enable the international research community to establish standards for academic publishing. As part of its mission, Open Research Central has established a portal through which research in any field can be submitted for formal publication on one of the open research publishing-compliant platforms.

African Academy of Sciences (AAS)

The African Academy of Sciences (The AAS) is a non-aligned, non-political, not-for-profit pan African organisation whose vision is to see transformed lives on the African continent through science.

Our tripartite mandate is recognising excellence through The AAS’ highly prestigious fellowship and award schemes, providing advisory and think tank functions for shaping Africa’s Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) strategies and policies and implementing key Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) programmes addressing Africa’s developmental challenges.

Emerald Open Research

Emerald Open Research: For social science outputs related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

Gates Open Research

Gates Open Research is a platform for rapid author-led publication and open peer review of research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

F1000 Research

F1000 Research: An open access publishing platform supporting data deposition and sharing.

Publish all your findings including null results, data notes and more.
Engage with your reviewers openly and transparently.
Accelerate the impact of your research.

Frontiers is Open Science

High quality open access publishing and research networking

Frontiers is Open Science

Frontiers is an online platform for the scientific community to publish open-access articles and network with colleagues.

Fast, open-access publication
Rigorous peer-review in real-time thanks to our interactive, online interface
Detailed metrics to follow the impact of articles
A networking platform made especially for the scientific community

Science Open

ScienceOpen is a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it. We provide context building services for publishers, to bring researchers closer to the content than ever before. Our advanced search and discovery functions, combined with post-publication peer review, recommendation, social sharing, and collection-building features make ScienceOpen the only research platform you’ll ever need.

Wellcome Open Research

Wellcome Open Research supports discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and we’re taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, global heating and infectious diseases

Finding Journals and Publishers

Academic Publisher's Directory

Research Search Engines

Open Access, Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Predatory Publishing Practices

Podcast by Denise Nicholson on OA, APCs and Predatory Publishing Practices

Additional publishing guidance

Open Access Student Publishing

Places to publish open access - in classics and related areas

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

List of Open Access databases (Vancouver Island University)

Listing of Open Access Databases

Directory of Open Access Journals

The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Today, this independent database contains over 16 500 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Open access journals from all countries and in all languages are welcome to apply for inclusion.