Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. It was founded in 2000 and has been owned by Springer, now Springer Nature, since 2008.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields. It is one of the world's largest scientific societies by membership. The ACS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. Its headquarters are located in Washington, D.C., and it has a large concentration of staff in Columbus, Ohio.
Proceedings of the Royal Society is the main research journal of the Royal Society. The journal began in 1831 and was split into two series in 1905:
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals.
Libertas Academica (LA) is an open access academic journal publisher specializing in the biological sciences and clinical medicine. It was acquired by SAGE Publications in September 2016.
Delayed open-access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the expiry of an embargo period following the initial publication date.
Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal that covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medicine, and biology. The journal has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.
MedChemComm is a peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing original (primary) research and review articles on all aspects of medicinal chemistry, including drug discovery, pharmacology and pharmaceutical chemistry. Until December 2019, it was published monthly by the Royal Society of Chemistry in partnership with the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry, of which it was the official journal. Authors can elect to have accepted articles published as open access. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2014 impact factor of 2.495, ranking it 27th out of 59 journals in the category "Chemistry, Medicinal" and 163 out of 289 journals in the category "Biochemistry & Molecular Biology".
Open Biology is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by the Royal Society covering biology at the molecular and cellular levels. The first issue was published in September 2011 with an editorial about the launch of the journal. All papers are made freely available under an open access model immediately on publication. The editor-in-chief is Jonathon Pines appointed in 2020.
The Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes experimental methods in video format. The journal is based in Cambridge, MA and was established in December 2006. Moshe Pritsker is the CEO and co-founder.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom zero. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.
"Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" is an article written by Science correspondent John Bohannon that describes his investigation of peer review among fee-charging open-access journals. Between January and August 2013, Bohannon submitted fake scientific papers to 304 journals owned by fee-charging open access publishers. The papers, writes Bohannon, "were designed with such grave and obvious scientific flaws that they should have been rejected immediately by editors and peer reviewers", but 60% of the journals accepted them. The article and associated data were published in the 4 October 2013 issue of Science as open access.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
Chinese Chemical Letters is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of chemistry. It was established in 1990 and is published by Elsevier on behalf of the Chinese Chemical Society. The editor-in-chief is Xu-Hong Qian.
ScienceOpen is a web-based platform, that hosts open access journals. It is freely accessible for readers, authors and publishers, and it generates its revenues via promotional services for publishers and authors' institutions. The organization is based in Berlin and has a technical office in Boston. It is a member of CrossRef, ORCID, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, STM Association and the Directory of Open Access Journals. The company was designated as one of “10 to Watch” by research advisory firm Outsell in its report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”
Endocrine Connections is a society-owned, monthly, peer-reviewed, open access academic journal. It covers endocrinology with a focus on basic, clinical and translational research and reviews in all areas of endocrinology, including papers that deal with non-classical tissues as source or targets of hormones and endocrine papers that have relevance to endocrine-related and intersecting disciplines and the wider biomedical community. It is jointly owned by the European Society of Endocrinology and the Society for Endocrinology. The editor-in-chief is Professor Adrian Clark, who succeeded Professor Josef Köhrle in 2021. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2022 impact factor of 2.9. The journal has been published by Bioscientifica since 2012.
