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Guidelines for entering data in the Low-Cost Open Access Table

👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍

The open access table is a resource where people can get information on journals that publish at zero or no cost. Following the open science workshop held on August 9-10, 2018, this resource is part of the hackathon that was held later and will direct people to journals that facilitate open science. In particular, this resource revolves around the fields of life sciences especially those in which Bioinformatics is applied, as the scope of the workshop theme revolved around Open Science in Bioinformatics.

Objective

The aim of this task is to enter data on journals that are open access into the Open Access table.

Data to be entered

  • Publisher: The name of the publisher in form of a hyperlink to the publisher's home webpage.
  • Journal: A list of journals that the publisher publishes and are open access.
  • Scope: The scope/subject covered by the journals. For example, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genetics.
  • Waiver Criteria: Details about the waiver. These include criteria used to award the waiver, application process, the amount of waiver (whether full or subsidy), and any other relevant details about the waiver. Provide a link to the appropriate webpage. Highlight full waivers available to Kenyan authors.
  • Other Open Science practices: This will capture details about other open science pillars facilitated by the journals which include open data, open peer-review, open methodology and other open science practices such as allowing pre-prints. Link to appropriate webpage to be provided.

How to do it

  1. The first step involves identifying a publisher and determining whether there are open access journals published by them. A good place to get started is Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) whose members are publishers who publish some open access journals. On OASPA's site, you will also find membership record where there are more useful details about the task at hand. For example, check the membership record for the publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) here. Other places/ways you can get information include Directory of Open Access Journals, this publication about fee waivers for open access journals, or you may perform a Google search. In the Open Access table, enter the publisher name in form of a hyperlink to their webpage in the Publisher column. In the case of PLOS, it would be Public Library of Science (PLOS).

  2. On the Journal Column, enter the journals that are open access and provide a link to these journals. If they are many open access journals, list a few that are relevant within the scope of life sciences especially concerning bioinformatics, for example, those in computational biology, genomics, genetics e.t.c, and provide a hyperlink to the publisher's list of these open access journals where the rest can be accessed. For example, PLOS has seven open access journals that can be listed and their link provided as Link to journals.

  3. On the Scope column, enter the scope of the journals that are listed in step 2. The scope is within life sciences where bioinformatics is especially applicable. As an example, the PLOS journal PLOS Genetics can be searched at Scimago, a journal ranking site and the result includes Subject Area and Category which is the scope of the journal. In this case, the relevant scope to us is Cancer Research, Genetics, Molecular Biology. Therefore, any researcher who would want to publish within these scopes would find this journal relevant for publishing. The scope of the journal may also be found by reading what the journal is about on the publisher's site. Sometimes these scopes overlap across journals and may be many; list the most applicable to our task.

  4. On the waiver criteria column, enter details about the waiver found on the publisher's site. As an example, PLoS offers Article Processing Charges (APC) waivers as seen here. The information we can gather for our data entry about the waiver include: who is eligible for the waiver (authors from low- and middle-income countries whose 50% or more of the work contained within the article is funded from the specified countries), mode of eligibility i.e. whether automatic eligibility or have to demonstrate financial need (in case of PLOS, automatic eligibility. Note, under Publication Fee Assistance (PFA) program, the author demonstrates financial need), the amount of waiver (Full waiver for Group 1 countries i.e. low income countries and $500 APC -the rest covered by PLOS- for Group 2 countries i.e. middle income countries), Application process (Authors apply for funding at the time of manuscript submission). Ensure that the webpage link to the waiver policy is provided. These details can be captured as a list in a consistent order.

  5. The last column, Other Open Science Practices, provides information on the journal's facilitation on other Open science practices apart from open access such as Open Data, Open Peer-review, Open Methodology and pre-prints. A list of these practices is provided as a hyperlink to the publisher's site where the policies are stated. For example, the publisher Wiley has other open science practices such as Open Data and Methodologies and pre-prints. BioMedCentral also has journals whose peer-review is open as seen here.

  6. Double check that the information captured is accurate.