As a researcher, publishing is one of the main ways to make your work more broadly visible to other researchers and the community. Taking a strategic view of the publishing process will likely increase your visibility as a researcher and improve your work's academic and societal impact.
Navigating the increasingly complex publishing landscape is not a simple task. Many considerations and decisions must be made to ensure your work is published in the best place to achieve your personal and publishing goals.
Developing a publishing strategy helps you ask the right questions and use the most appropriate tools to evaluate and select the journals best matched to your target audience, professional goals, and values as a researcher.
This section of the guide will help you understand the different publishing models and outline the key aspects of journal selection.
An important starting point for your publishing strategy is deciding on your preferred publishing model. There are two main publishing models used for scholarly research:
See the Open Access Publishing page in this guide for more information.
The traditional, subscription-based model has been used to disseminate academic and scholarly information since the 17th century. Researchers submit their articles to journal publishers for appraisal in this for-profit model.
Articles that meet the journal's requirements undergo a peer review process and are then published. In most cases, researchers must give some or all of their copyrights to the publisher.
Once the manuscript is accepted and published, it can only be accessed through an annual subscription or purchased as an individual article.
The Open Access (OA) publishing model emerged in the late 1980s, made possible by the arrival of the internet and a shift to online publishing.
This model is characterised by making research publicly available to everyone free of charge. With significantly fewer copyright and licencing restrictions than the traditional model, this enables research authors to keep the copyright of their work and readers to freely access and build on (where licencing permits) the published research.
The UTS Publishing site is another valuable source of information, providing advice on many different aspects of publishing. It includes UTS Faculty White lists to support your journal selection process.
There are personal and institutional ramifications of having your affiliation data misrepresented, so it is essential you accredit your link with UTS correctly using the byline shown below.
Researcher name, University of Technology Sydney, Centre Name, [campus], Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
OR
Researcher name, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty, [campus], Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
Predatory journals are publications that claim to be legitimate scholarly journals but misrepresent their publishing practices. Some common forms of predatory publishing practices include falsely claiming to provide peer review, hiding information about Article Processing Charges (APCs), misrepresenting members of the journal's editorial board, and other violations of copyright or scholarly ethics.
Some resources to help you avoid predatory publishers: