Scholarly publishing
What is scholarly publishing?
In any given research field, there is often a consensus on which types of publication are currently considered the most important, e.g. journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, etc. There are no clear-cut guidelines on the most appropriate publishing procedure. Scholarly publishing is the system through scholarly papers and books are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use for other scholars, learners, and the general public. Demands from your institution, funding organizations, the political sphere, or the traditions of the research field itself, can all influence and affect your choice of publishing model.
What are the models of publishing?
Traditional or closed model
The traditional or closed scholarly publication model is a cycle involving researchers, publishers, editors, peer reviewers, and libraries. It is considered to be closed as the reader (or usually an institutional library) pays a subscription for a full years' access to journal content. Libraries try to overcome publishers paywalls by subscribing to many resources, to make them available to the members of the academic institutions they belong.
However, the traditional scholary publishing system is in a state of rapid change and evolution as authors have found new and creative ways of disseminating their scholarly work.
Open Acccess model
Over the past years, Open Access has become central to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, businesses, the public, and librarians. Increasingly, institutions that support research — from public and private research funders to institutions of higher education — are implementing policies that require researchers to make articles that report on research generated from their funding openly accessible and fully useable by the public.
What is this guide about?
Publishing your work, may prove to be challenging and time-consuming. Thus, it could make you feel that it is difficult to achieve it in the course of an already busy academic career. To that end, this guide was designed to help you with:
- familiarizing yourselves with useful tips about how to prepare your publications.
- selecting journals appropriate to publish your work.
- introducing you to the editorial process and copyright basics.
- understanding preprints and postprints submissions and the open access model of publishing.