Research Guides: Open Access: How to Publish OA

Green OA: SMU Scholar

SMU Scholar is a complement to traditional publishing. It hosts collections for many colleges and departments already, and more can be added.

How do I do it?

Your work can still be published in any number of traditional outlets. If you do not sign away your authors' rights, you may be able to store a copy in SMU Scholar too. See directions on how to submit your materials here.

Gold OA: Publish in Select Journals

The library has publishing agreements to pay Article Processing Charges (APC's) in order to publish as Gold Open Access in several selected journals.

SMU currently has OA publishing agreements with these publishers:

Springer Nature -- see author guide and participating journals here; SMU is a member of the SCELC and so your OA fees are automatically covered.
Wiley -- corresponding authors of articles must be published in a Wiley or Hindawi fully open access journal (submitted on or after 1 January 2023) or published open access in a hybrid journal (accepted on or after 1 January 2023).
Elsevier -- see author guide and participating journals here. Articles must have an original acceptance date between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2028.
Some Cambridge University Press journals -- in the right-hand Access column, check the boxes next to “Open access” and “Contains open access”.
IEEE Open Access journals
IOP Publishing (formerly known as the Institute of Physics) -- information for authors here, browse or search IOP's list of journals here to see the OA options for each.
Berghahn Open Anthropology -- 14 journals. FAQ for authors.
These journals from the Company of Biologists: Development, Journal of Cell Science, and Journal of Experimental Biology.
Microbiology Society -- see Publications for their list of journals. Be sure to submit your article with your @smu.edu email address to qualify.

This list is expected to grow as we sign more transformative agreements with publishers, so check back frequently.

How do I do it?

Submit your article via the typical submission process for that journal. After manuscript acceptance, if the journal has an open access agreement with us, you will be advised that OA publishing is available to you, with SMU paying the publication costs. You can choose whether or not to accept it.

FAQ

What will SMU pay for?

SMU's agreements with the publishers listed under Gold OA will cover all the Article Processing Charges (APCs) so that your article can be freely available anywhere on the internet, at no cost to you.

However, the agreement only covers if the SMU author is listed as the corresponding author.

What about errata?

The charge for errata is covered.

What about over-length charges?

Some journals (particularly IEEE journals) charge if an article goes over a certain page length. This charge is not covered by SMU.

What about color charges?

This charge is usually to print the images/graphics in color in the print edition (color online is usually free). Color charges are not paid by our agreements.

Creative Commons licenses

OA content, both text and multimedia, is frequently published with Creative Commons (CC) licenses. CC licenses give you more control over how people can reuse your work:

CC-Attribution (CC-BY) -- any re-users must give you credit
CC-ShareAlike (CC-SA) -- others may remix, adapt, and build upon your work, as long as they give their new creation the same CC license as you use
CC-NoDerivs (CC-ND) -- others may reuse the work for any purpose, even commercially, but it cannot be shared with others
CC-NonCommercial (CC-NC) -- others may remix, adapt, and build upon your work in any non-commercial way, but they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms

You can also combine some of the above licenses, such as CC BY-NC-ND. Read more about the license options here.

Other OA outlets

In addition to the options listed on this page, other high-quality publications are also OA. Use these tools to help find them:

Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities This link opens in a new window
Use the Filters option to the right of the search box to limit only to Open Access. Then limit to your discipline or other search criteria.
SMU Libraries has access to Journalytics for Education, Psychology & Psychiatry, Computer Science, Health & Nursing, and Mathematics & Science, as well as Predatory Reports.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
These are all confirmed OA journals, but there is no quality-checking to be included on the list, so do your own checking. Those listed with the DOAJ Seal (about 10%) have met seven criteria for best OA practices.