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Open Access Publishing at UC Davis

Finding Journals to Publish Open Access

Deciding to which journal a manuscript should be submitted can be daunting task.

There are tools available that help with decision making. Many publishers have now manuscript matcher (a.k.a. journal finder) in place which suggest journals in the publisher's portfolio based on the manuscript title or abstract. Information is usually available on the publisher's website. EndNote/Web of Sciences offer this service as well, independent from specific publishers.

When planning or required to publish Open Access (OA) an author has a number of options:

Authors who have research funding to pay an article processing charge (APC) for OA publishing can submit to full OA journals. But also most of the subscription journals are "hybrid" now, meaning the author can choose to publish open access by paying an APC. 

Authors who do not have research funding available can select a journal that is covered by one of the UC Transformative Open Access agreements, under which UC Libraries provides subventions and/or covers the full cost for publishing OA.

There are also journals/publishers that publish articles in OA for a very low APC or no cost at all, for example the Open Library of Humanities or the journals in UC's eScholarship Publishing.

A index to find peer-reviewed, full OA  journals for publication is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).