Looking to publish in Open Access but not sure how to find a suitable Open Access journal in your specific discipline? The easiest way to start your search is browsing through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which was created to increase the accessibility, usage, and impact of quality OA resources.

The DOAJ indexes academic journals across all disciplines that are peer-reviewed and only have the Full OA-option, not the Hybrid OA-option. If you already have a specific journal in mind to publish your publication in, you can enter its title or ISSN in the simple search box on the homepage and check whether it is included in the DOAJ or not. If it is, you can rest assured that the journal is qualified. If it’s not, there is still the possibility that is has not been brought to the attention of the DOAJ yet, since publishers have to apply to have their journal indexed. You can take a look at the application form and the criteria the DOAJ uses to measure quality here.

In case you don’t yet know where you want to publish, you can look up journals via the search box on the home page or via the more advanced search by clicking on ‘search’ in the upper toolbar.

You can either search for journals or articles, for our goal we will select the journals option. Aside from using keywords and subjects, you can also search by (country of) publisher or journal language. If you want to use controlled vocabulary for your search, you can select a subject filter in the left toolbar. Let us for example have a look at the subject “Language and Literature”, which gives us 1433 indexed journals.[1] You can then refine further by subtopic (e.g. Romanic languages), language, license, publishers, publishers’ countries, and peer review type. An interesting filter is to only look for journals without Article Processing Charges (APCs), meaning that you can publish your article in OA without having to pay for it.

We see that 91% of the 1433 journals do not require the payment of an APC, of which nine are published in Belgium (amongst others Interférences litteraires/literaire interferenties, published at KU Leuven, and Authorship, published at Ghent University). This is a clear indication of that fact that it’s a misconception that publishing in Gold OA will always cost you money.[2]

Once you click on a specific journal title you will find more information about how to publish with this journal, such as author fee, instructions for authors, expected time from submission to publication, etc. Moreover, the DOAJ tells you under which license articles are published and if the author retains unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights or not. Finally, the journal’s metadata are listed here: publisher, publications language(s), and subject(s) (according to the Library of Congress Classification system).

With this method, the DOAJ is a surefire way to find the journal best suited for your article. If you are looking to publish a book rather than an article, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library are a good starting point to locate Open Access book publishers. [3]

Limo is the discovery service that allows you to search the entire KU Leuven Libraries collection. It is made up of an extensive collection of both printed and electronic resources. So with one search you will not only find all physical items (e.g. print books, journals, newspapers) available in KU Leuven Libraries but also scientific output from the university’s researchers, which are collected in Lirias, and a vast selection of e-resources, such as electronic books, journals, databases, and also audio-visual material.

The collection of e-resources is particularly impressive, as Limo provides access to an impressive 1,5 billion publications across the thousands of online databases it has access to and a selection of freely accessible e-resources (Open Access). A number that big might make it look like, no matter what you do, you will only ever be able to scratch the surface in your endeavor to search for the right publications. However, Limo offers a multitude of tools to make the search easier. Equipped with these you can dig deep into the vast collection of publications and, hopefully, strike gold.

When you are looking through items in Limo, there is a sidebar with multiple filters that will help you refine your search. Bear in mind, some of these filters will be more useful than others. Searching for physical items, for example, will be greatly helped by filtering on specific libraries. You can also exclude publications written in languages you don’t understand, which will surely shrink down the search results . If you are looking for a specific type of resource, like audio fragments or conference proceedings, there is a filter for that as well. Less useful would be filtering on topic, as it is sometimes unclear how these topics are assigned and this could make your search results misleading. In addition to these examples there are many other filters that will help you refine your search. Test them out and see which ones work best for you! Once you have found the perfect search, you can save it and turn on notifications for it so you always know when new publications match this search.

You can also save specific publications in your ‘saved items’ overview. However, for collecting and organizing bibliographic data it is best to use a reference manager such as the free and open source software Zotero. Keep an eye out for the upcoming posts of Nele Noppe about Zotero to learn more about the functionalities of reference managers.

Sometimes your search will not yield any results, but that does not mean it ends there. Of the thousands of databases you can sift through in Limo, you have full-text access to about 900 of them. Limo will generally only show you these results. In order to see all possible results, regardless of whether or not you have online access, there is also a filter for that. In “tweak my searches”, the first option is “More results without online access”. After all, no online access doesn’t mean no access at all. For starters, you can search for the journal title and see if the volume where the article you are looking for appears in is available at one of KU Leuven Libraries physical locations, or through the interlibrary loan service.  Additionally, all items in Limo have a DOI number, which can help you to look for the publications in other search engines.

If you need help with how to properly use Limo feel free to contact your subject specialist!

More information:

• https://bib.kuleuven.be/english/collections-access-borrowing/what-is-limo
• https://bib.kuleuven.be/english/collections-access-borrowing/searching