Best Practices for Success in OA Publishing

 [Approximate Reading Time : 4 mins]

Open access (OA) publishing is fast overtaking the proprietary or for-profit commercial publishing that dominated the field of scholarly publications for the last two centuries. In this new genre of publishing, the author pays the publishing costs and retains the copyright. The peer review process is handled by the publisher, who also publishes the content on the internet, where it can be accessed by the public free of charge.

Favored largely by scholars and researchers, most such ventures have the backing of institutions or other funding agencies. The immense reach of the internet has helped fuel the rapid growth of OA scholarly publishing.

For an academic library or publisher to run an OA journal successfully, it is essential that they adopt some best practices. These include the following:

Incorporating OA Metadata

Harnessing the full potential of metadata will help your content reach a much wider audience. The use of metadata, perhaps the most important of OA practices, makes publications or journals easy to access. In the digital world, metadata makes it easy for library search engines and machines to discover, access, and reuse research articles. This way, more readers are likely to discover your publications, and this can lead you to collecting a greater number of citations for your work. The use of specific formats when publishing, such as JATS XML, can help facilitate this process.

Indexing the Right Way

By indexing your articles the right way, you will boost their chances of being found by search engines. Lack of proper indexing can make it extremely difficult for readers to access your OA research. Using effective and reputed indexing tools and databases such as Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) can also help you with this. Adding your journals to scholarly indexes can help you establish your credibility and reputation.

Archiving for Posterity

Irrespective of whether a journal survives the passage of time, it is essential to ensure that the valuable work done by researchers remains accessible to readers for eternity. This is where archiving comes in to help preserve these works. A digital repository such as PubMed Central (PMC) is an example of a research publishing archive that is easily available to the public. You will have to do some due diligence to zero in on the archives best suited for your particular genre.

Publicizing and Advertising

As with most other products and services, advertising is crucial to promoting your research work. This cannot be limited to just scholarly platforms, and you will need to come up with a balanced yet diverse marketing strategy. Your research promotion strategy will be based on the kind of target audience you are seeking to attract. Social media, emails, and niche networking such as through the use of influencers is the way to go.

All this requires concentrated effort and a clearly demarcated strategy in journal management. Amnet offers you technology-driven solutions to create and distribute content. We have partnered with the Coko Foundation to develop an advanced open source journal and editorial platform. Talk to us to find out more about how this can help you with journal publishing in the scholarly segment.

Sources:
1. https://typeset.io/resources/4-best-practices-for-open-access-oa-journal-publishing/.
2. https://www.slideshare.net/doaj/oa-journal-publishing-doaj-indexing-and-best-practice.