Where you publish can maximize your impact. Many recent studies indicate that open-access articles are more immediately and more frequently cited than non-open-access articles. Increased citation rates lead to greater research impact.
The way to maximize the impact of your research findings is to maximize the exposure to your work.
Retain your copyrights. Copyright, when signed over to a publisher, limits your ability to disseminate your work. By retaining your copyright, you can maximize your options for dissemination, thus maximizing your work's potential reach and gaining a wider audience for your scholarship. You can retain your copyright by utilizing an author's addendum. We recommend using the SPARC author's addendum. You can also consult the SHERPA/RoMEO site for information about the copyright policies and self-archiving terms found in most publishers' agreements.
Make your article open access.
Publish in an open-access journal. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists thousands of journals. To publish in many of these journals, you may be required to pay a publication fee. This fee can be charged to your funding agency. (Consult SHERPA/Juliet for a list of research funders' policies on open access.). The UFOAP is also available to help with costs of publishing in open access journals.
Pay an open-access or publication fee. Many traditional, subscription-based publishers allow authors to pay an additional publication fee to make their articles immediately available to the public. Journals with this option are often referred to as "hybrid open access journals." Publishers refer to these fees by various terms such as "paid access," "open choice," "sponsored article," etc.
Some journals make their content free after a certain "embargo" period. Thousands of journals published online through HighWire Press make their content available for free after a period of time, usually 12 months. Consult the HighWire Press list of Free Online Full-text Articles.
Post your article in a repository.
A repository can be a pre-print server such as the arXiv e-Print service at Cornell or a subject repository such as PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health digital archive. At the University of Florida, you can also deposit your articles in the University of Florida Institutional Repository (IR@UF), in accordance with the terms of your publication agreement if you publish an article in a traditional commercial or society journal.
The advantages of posting an article to a repository:
Find out more about the journal before you decide to publish there to ensure that the publisher's high costs do not pose a barrier to access:
The text of this section comes, in part, from the University of California Berkeley's Library Scholarly Communications web site.
Compiled from Washington University School of Medicine's Bernard Becker Medical Library "Strategies for Enhancing the Impact of Research"
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