Use Alternative Forms of Publishing

Where you choose to publish your work matters. The number of readers you reach, your work’s resulting impact on knowledge advancement, and the evolution of effective scholarly communication processes are all affected by your publishing choices.

The primary advantage of alternative forms of publishing is that they provide unrestricted (free) access to all potential readers, as compared to traditional subscription or purchase-based publications.

Most alternative forms also:

Include peer-review or other quality control measures.
Are available quickly or immediately after creation.
Are managed for long-term availability.
Are discoverable through traditional indexes or new, community-built services.

See a description of primary alternatives and our table of the characteristics of scholarly publishing options.

Three alternatives have an especially significant potential to maximize the impact of your work and influence the evolution of scholarly communications. Consider doing the following:

Society members

Take action: Help your society understand publishing best practices, including open access. Suggest experiments in open access publishing and examine alternative sources for revenues to support other society activities.

Editors

Take action: Encourage your publisher to adopt an open-access business model or take advantage of eScholarship’s open access journal publishing services, offered free of charge to the UC community.

Authors

Take action: Submit your work to open-access journals, including those available in eScholarship. When publishing, retain copyright and, working with your department, deposit your working papers and postprints in eScholarship, the University of California’s open access digital publishing platform.

Promotion committee members

Take action: When evaluating a scholar’s articles, don’t rely on journal prestige or impact factor alone because: a) such reliance discriminates against new journals that may be of high quality; and b) impact factors are derived from all articles in a journal rather than being a true measure of the impact of a particular piece of research.