Subject Guides: Guide to Selecting a Journal: Starting your own journal

Why an Open Access Journal?

The decision to start a journal should not be taken lightly. It takes a fair amount of planning hard work to produce a sustainable journal. Your institutional library is a good place to start, especially with regard to finding the appropriate software as well as registration of the journal.

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) is a signatory to the Berlin Declaration for Open Access (2003). The goal of the Open Access movement, and in South Africa the National Research Foundation, is to make publicly funded research publications freely accessible to all researchers. The UWC Open Access Policy was adopted in 2014.

The Open Access Movement

Open Access is a recognised international movement seeking to facilitate online access to academic information including publications, science & data. Open Access publications have no financial or technical barriers to access. Open Access publications can be read, downloaded, distributed and used without payment. (open access.nl).

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Peter Suber (2015)

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives (SPARC).

Open Science is the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods (FOSTER).

Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control (Wikipedia).

UWC Open Access Policy

Key features of an academic journal

Title - for academic journals a descriptive title is recommended as opposed to a name which may require explanation.

- Description of the journal

- Journal Scope

- Editorial Team

- Editorial Board

- Peer review guide

- Publishing ethics statement

- Article Submission workflow

- Publishing frequency

Journal and article registration

International Standard Serial Number

An ISSN or International Standard Serials Number, is a code assigned to a serial publication and acts as a unique identifier for that publication. ISSNs are registered internationally with the ISSN Portal. The registration includes the unique name of the publication, it's website and details of the publisher. This information, along with the assigned ISSN, helps avoid duplication of a journal's name. Typically an ISSN has eight digits as follows: 2410-7972. This ISSN is registered to the African Human Mobility Review (AHMR).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier for an online publication. DOI's typically consist of an alphanumeric string and can also be expressed as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Unlike an ISSN, a DOI is applied to an individual article and can also be applied to a journal issue. There are a number of agencies licensed to assign DOI's many of which as associated with the International DOI Foundation (IDF). A typical DOI consists of a site number unique to the hosting institution, it may also contain an abbreviation of a journal title, volume and issue as well as an article number. This DOI 10.14426/ahmr.v8i1.1071 resolves to the article "Migration and Politics in South Africa" published in the AHMR, volume 8, issue number 1, published in 2022.

What is a journal?

Functions of an Academic Journal

What do journals do?

Academic journals serve four basic functions. A fifth function was added for online journals.

Registration - establishes an authors' ownership of an idea

Certification - peer review establishes the quality and authenticity of the research

Dissemination - published research is communicated to its intended audience

Archiving - the published record serves an an archive of scientific research

Navigation - published articles contain links to other records which direct users to other supporting publications and data

(Rallison, 2015)

Journal indexes and aggregators

Overview of indexes and aggregators

Journal aggregators are indexes or lists (also known as databases) of journals that may cover specific disciplines, are published by a specific publisher or groups of publishers, or are published in a specific geographic region. Journal aggregators help track journal performance in terms of developing impact factors, citation reports and journal rankings. Some journal aggregators collect both journals as well as individual articles.