Publishing your Research Article: Science and Engineering : Consider Open Access

This page provides resources to help you make your research article openly accessible. 

Open Access allows your research to be discovered more quickly and broadly, raising its visibility and moving science forward. For a good overview of the value of Open Access, visit this resource: 

Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. It can be accomplished via publishing and/or self-archiving. This resource is a good starting point for understanding open access principles: 

Publishing an Open Access article in a journal means that the published version is immediately and freely available upon publication. This is referred to as 'Gold Open Access'. It is the best way to make your published peer-reviewed research quickly discoverable and actionable.

To compensate for the financial loss of paid access, some publishers charge APCs (Article Processing Charges) for publishing Open Access journal articles. APCs are meant to cover the publisher's costs for the publication process, vary widely by publisher, and are often paid by the author, the author's funder, or the author's institution.

When you are finding journals to publish in, you can check if you will need to pay an APC. The 'Find Open Access Journals' section below has resources that will help you do this efficiently.

UW-Madison Libraries have agreements to reduce or eliminate APC's with these publishers & publications!

  CAUTION: You typically do not need to pay for Open Access publishing in order meet Public Access requirements. See our Meet Public Access Requirements page. 

Below are some resources that will be helpful in finding credible journals to publish Open Access articles. Note that some of the resources also allow you to find journals based on whether they have APCs (Article Processing Charges).

 Even if you are not publishing in an Open Access journal, you can still make your work immediately and freely available via self-archiving. This is referred to as 'Green Open Access'. 

To self-archive, authors provide access to a version of their article in an institutional repository, disciplinary archive, academic collaboration networking site (e.g ResearchGate), or personal website. Most publishers now will allow sharing of a preprint or an accepted manuscript in a repository or similar. The published article / final version of record (VOR) will often have more restrictions related to sharing. 

  CAUTION: Before sharing your article, check publisher policy. See our Manage Copyright page.  

Repositories and disciplinary archives are more trusted to ensure perpetual access than academic collaboration sites or websites. There are many excellent options for self-archiving. Here are a few selected resources: 

Looking for more options? Try these directories of additional OA repositories: