Traditional publishers, open access journals, institutional repositories, preprint servers, eprint servers, sites like ResearchGate, personal/departmental websites, conferences of every description: with so many options, how do you choose where to publish?
Does this venue publish related work? Especially, did you cite other work from this venue? You can also use tools provided by various research databases to find journals or other publication venues that are most used for your topic. See the library's research guide for your subject to get a list of relevant research databases.
Who controls the copyright to your work? Many commercial publishers require you to sign over copyright to them. This means that you no longer have control over the use of your own work--you can't reuse or share that paper, for example in ResearchGate, and you can't deposit it in an institutional repository. Some publishers even restrict the use of preprint servers. This becomes very important if your funder requires the paper to be deposited or otherwise be made freely available either immediately or after an embargo period. If you're not sure about the copyright regulations of your publisher, the SHERPA/RoMEO project provides a searchable lists of publishers' copyright and open access policies.
This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
