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Scholarly Communication Guide: Scholalrly Publishing

This guide provides information on the support services available at the library to help with all stages of your research, from planning your research, to measuring the impact of your research.

Publishing Cycle

This is a circular flow chart of the publication cycle: creation, evaluation, publication, dissemination and access, preservation, and reuse. Creation is where research gets proposed, funded, and reported on. Evaluation is where academic works are evaluated for quality and edited by their peers. Publication is where a publisher provides editing, layout, and publication services. Dissemination and access is where works are distributed in print or online, through libraries, retailers, and the web. Preservation is where copies or versions of the work may be saved for posterity. Resume is where works get read, cited, and recombined.

Data source: Arizona State University Library Libguide

Getting published

Before you start writing for publication, there are certain factors you should consider:

  • Is your work novel?
  • Have you added a new dimension to existing theories?
  • How much is currently known about your research area?
  • What journals have published similar work?
  • What are the impact factors of the journals?
  • Do any of the journals charge authors for submissions?
  • Does your University or department publish an undergraduate journal?
  • Have you consulted with your supervisor about publishing?
  • Has your research involved collaboration with industry?
  • If your research involved industry or funding bodies, are you permitted to publish?
  • Will you be available in several months to respond to referees comments?

Where to Publish? To consider:

  • Accredited Journals
  • High Impact Jurnals
  • Top Journals in a field
  • Open Access Journals
  • Conference proceedings
  • Books

 Choosing an academic Publication venue: a short guide for beginners

Transformative Agreements

Transformative agreements are those contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services

You can access the UNIZULU transformative Agreements here.

Unique Author Identifiers

The scholarly research community faces the issue of author ambiguity because several researchers in the same or different fields may share the same first and last names. To circumvent this problem, the idea has been raised of assigning each researcher a "unique author identifier."

The idea of a centrally administered system to unambiguously identify authors of scientific papers has been around since the 1940s but has received renewed attention with the growth of online journals, databases, and publication archives . The benefits of such a system include:

  • Less ambiguity as to who has published a certain paper when different variations of an author’s name have been used
  • Ability to accurately measure citations of individual papers or authors
  • Easier evaluation of an author’s productivity and impact in his/her field

 

OpenID provides a means to sign in to multiple websites using a single existing account and password. OpenID is already used by services such as Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! and has been rapidly adopted throughout the web. More than 50,000 websites currently accept OpenID for logins.

Open Access Publishing

Open access is the online, free, and unrestricted availability of scholarly information, including scholarly articles, open science, open data, and open education. Open access frees the research process for quicker dissemination and rapid discovery. Open access affects the full scholarship cycle of scholarly communication through allowing greater access to research. Open Access is a vital component of scholarly communication and influences all components of scholarly communication, such as copyright, author rights, and publishing. 

 Benefits of Open Access

Orange Open Access Lock explaining benefits of Open Access

  • OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).
  • ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).
  • OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources.

 

Open science is an umbrella term that encompasses different aspects of science, such as open research, including open access publishing, open research, open scholarship, and open education (UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science).

Open science

Choosing the right journal

Finding the right place for research is key to reaching the intended audience, receiving constructive feedback, and being appropriately recognized. To achieve this, you and the researcher must explore article types, publication differences, and support tools, among other options. compiled a list of considerations to begin this process. In South Africa, only articles published in accredited journals are considered for subsidy. Journals included in the lists below are considered "accredited" by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and will be taken into account for government subsidy and NRF evaluation. 

 

 

Journal Finder Tools

Journal finder tools 

The following tools can also help you identify journals suitable for your article: 

  • Elsevier Journal Finder 
    Use the title and abstract of your paper or search by keywords to find Elsevier journals that may be suitable for your research topic.  
  • IEEE Publication Recommender 
    Search by keywords to find IEEE journals or conferences that may be suitable for your research topic. You can also compare critical points such as journal quality indicators, acceptance rates, and time to review. 
  • JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator) 
    Use the title and abstract of your paper to find journals indexed by PubMed that may be suitable for your research topic. You can also search for collaborators, editors or other papers similar to yours. 
  • Manuscript matcher accessed via the EndNote app or EndNote Online, see our EndNote guide to access the software. Use the title and abstract of your paper to find journals indexed by Web of Science that may be suitable for your research topic. 
  • Springer Journal Suggester 
    Search by keywords to find Springer and BMC journals that may be suitable for your research topic. 
  • Taylor & Francis Journal Suggester 
    Use the abstract of your paper to find Taylor & Francis journals that may be suitable for your research topic. 
  • Wiley Journal Finder Beta 
    Use the title and abstract of your paper to find Wiley journals that may be suitable for your research topic.  

Predatory Publishing

There are many measures of quality to assist you in determining the legitimacy of a publisher or journal. Resources like DOAJ, SHERPA/RoMEO and recently ThinkCheckSubmit are all credible initiatives to use alongside certain indicators to evaluate publications:

  • Is the journal's mission and scope clearly defined?
  • Are there spelling and grammar errors on the website, in titles and abstracts?
  • Is there an editorial team you can contact? Or are the email addresses non-professional and non-journal/publisher affiliated?
  • Is there a submission fee instead of a publication fee?
  • Does the journal charge excessive fees for publication? It should be clear what fees are paid for. Predatory publishers hide fees until after you submit your manuscript.
  • Does the publication claim to have an impact factor when there is none?
  • Are there clear production, peer-review and publication processes?