Publishing advice

CoopIST is a CIRAD sector-based website accessible to all free of charge. It offers resources, tools and advice notes to simplify scientific publishing by researchers and for managing STI in research centres of the global South. Several sections will be useful prior to publishing, then for writing, publishing and disseminating, and lastly to learn about research evaluation and publication indicators. [French-language resource]

This site offers numerous support materials for education and training in publishing and scientific information management.  It also offers "self-training modules" (libres parcours), a manual, a reading list, exercises, a toolbox, links and series of presentations. The site was developed by  B. Pochet from the University of Liège and is in open access.  [French-language resource]

AuthorAID is a free website providing publishing support for authors in the global South. The site exists in English and Spanish. It proposes online mentoring, along with training and resources, all free of charge. It also provides information on various funding opportunities. AuthorAID operates through a network of over 20,000 members based in 175 countries.

This free tool helps authors find a quality journal in 3 steps: Think, Check and Submit. It exists in numerous languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, etc.).  

This tool helps authors find potential journals from those indexed in Medline, the US National Library of Medicine database. (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_overview.html). The search is  based on the manuscript title and/or its abstract, or even the language, type of article, open access, etc.  JANE was developed by the BioSemantics Group at the Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam (https://biosemantics.erasmusmc.nl/index.php).

This free tool helps authors choose the best journal for their draft article out of  more than 28,000 possibilities. The search is based on the journal title, the publisher, the subject area, impact factor, type of access, along with keywords and  ISSN. The abstract of the draft article can also be entered to obtain a list of journals likely to publish it. This tool was developed by Edanz, a Japanese publication services company (https://www.edanz.com/). 

This free search engine helps authors find the journals likely to publish their draft scientific  article out of all those published by Elsevier.  Merely enter the title, the abstract, some keywords, or the scientific field. Other criteria can be added: impact factor, publication type, review and publication times.

This free search engine helps authors identify the journals likely to publish their draft scientific article out of all those published by SpringerNature. Merely enter the title, the manuscript text and indicate the scientific subject area. Other criteria can be added: minimum impact factor, minimum acceptance rate, maximum time to first decision.

This free search engine helps authors find the journals likely to publish their draft scientific article out of all those published by Wiley. Merely entre the title of the manuscript and its abstract.

MIAR (University of Barcelona) is a free database providing information on over 47,000 journals and their indexing in multidisciplinary or specialized databases (Web of Science, Scopus), journal directories and catalogues (DOAJ, Sherpa-Romeo). MIAR provides an indicator, ICDS, whose value reflects the visibility of each journal in these different sources.

SHERPA ROMEO is a free website that analyses and advises on publishers' policies as regards open access and self-archiving rights for scientific journals. This site was developed by  the UK not-for-profit company JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) to support universities and research centres. Several video tutorials are available  that explain how to use SHERPA ROMEO.  Each entry provides a summary of the publisher's policy, including what version of an article can  be deposited, with the corresponding conditions.

Starting from a few simple questions, this tool helps you test your rights and obligations when disseminating your article in open access. It is primarily based on article 30 of the 2016 French Law for a Digital Republic, which authorizes the authors of articles covering research at least fifty-percent funded by public or European funds to deposit their post-print in an open archive in open access, within 6 months after publication for scientific and technical articles and within 12 months for articles in the human and social sciences. Answers are provided in a few clicks. [French-language resource]

Diadorim (Diretorio de politicas editoriais das revistas cientificas brasileiras) is a free site providing information on the self-archiving and distribution rights for more than 2,800 Brazilian journals. The site uses a colour code to class journals according to their policy. [Portuguese-language resource]

The Dulcinea portal (copyright and self-archiving authorizations for Spanish scientific journals) presents the open access and self-archiving editorial policies of more than 1,760 scientific journals in Spanish. The site is managed by the Spanish group CSO-Open Access to Science

This free website provides information on the embargo periods applied by Elsevier journals. At the end of the embargo period, authors can benefit from wide sharing options for their article, such as publicly posting their accepted version in an institution's open archive.

This free website sets out the open access conditions for all journals published by Taylor & Francis : article publishing charge, embargo periods (prior to self-archiving by the author) and available licences.

COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics, provides editors and publishers with advice and resources on all aspects of publication ethics, especially in managing cases of inappropriate behaviour in research and publishing. It also offers its members a discussion forum.

Data in the  Scopus database produced by Elsevier are used to calculate the "SCImago Journal Rank" (SJR indicator), freely accessible on the Internet. The SJR of a journal is the number of times an article in the journal is cited by other articles over the 3 years following its publication. This citation index has the particularity of weighting the value of each citation depending on the ranking of the citing journal.

The French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (HCERES) provides guides for research outputs and research activities in numerous scientific fields, along with lists of journals on Economics and Management, and Linguistics. These lists constitute evaluation tools specific to each research discipline.  [French-language resource]

The JCR database lists the impact factors of around 12,000 scientific and technical journals, conference proceedings in science and techniques, and in the social sciences, indexed in the Clarivate Analytics "Web of Science" database. The impact factor is the ratio between the number of article citations of a journal over a 2-year period (in some cases extended to  5 years)  and the number of articles published by the same journal over the same period.

LTWA is a list of all standardized abbreviations used for words in scientific citations. It is based on standard ISO 4 which defines a uniform system for the abbreviations of journal titles. A useful source for abbreviating a journal title, word for word, in a citation. It is produced and updated annually by the ISSN International Centre.

TThe list of journals indexed in the PubMed database (NCBI-National Center for Biotechnology Information database) can be used to identify the standard abbreviated titles of over 5,000 journals. 

CASSI is an online search tool developed by the American Chemical Society intended for researchers and librarians who need accurate bibliographic information on journals analysed in the chemistry fields. This free tool can be used to rapidly search for and identify journal titles or title abbreviations, the ISSN number, the publisher and the journal website. This database includes a list of publications indexed by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS-Journals).

The Couperin consortium is a non-profit association funded by the contributions of its members and subsidized by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Its aim is to make scientific and technical information the common good of the scientific community. This website is devoted to open science: definitions, news, guides, policies, along with reference texts on open access to articles and research data. [French-language resource]

OpenAIRE is a free, open access European infrastructure devoted to the research results of European scientists (publications, research data, etc.). Its aim is to ensure the visibility and accessibility of research results from projects funded by the European Commission. Researchers receiving such funding are required to ensure open access to their  research results no more than 6 months after publication (or 12 months for the human and social sciences). Researchers are free to deposit their articles in OpenAire, but OpenAire also harvests numerous institutional or national open archives.

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) aims to promote Open Access, Open Data and Open Education. SPARC works with over 240 academic and research libraries in Europe, Japan and Africa, to democratize access to knowledge. The site provides information on Open Access, Open Education and Open Data, and describes what SPARC does.

This free and anonymous game is a quiz based on 4 sets of questions that enable you to assess your knowledge of Open Access. It was developed by CIRAD in 2020 based on its board game "Libérez la science" (Liberate science), a FAIR-play game created in 2019 and available in the  Agritrop open archive: https://doi.org/10.18167/agritrop/00438.  [French-language resource].  

CIRAD's CoopIST website offers a selection of free resources providing open access to journals, articles, books, databases and research data in the fields of tropical agriculture and sustainable development. [French-language resource]

AJOL is a not-for-profit organization based in South Africa offering a free interface giving access to over 520 peer-reviewed journals published in Africa, of which 270 in open access. The aim is to provide researchers and students with access to African scholarly research. It is possible to search by title, author and keywords to identify over 184,000 downloadable articles.   

DOAJ is a free platform providing access to over 16,000 open-access, peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals in all scientific fields, from 126 countries. Over 11,700 of these journals do not apply publication charges. Over 6 million open access articles can be consulted on the platform.  DOAJ is an independent, non-profit organization managed by Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C. (IS4OA), a community interest company based in the United Kingdom. 

This directory of open access-journals, produced by the EBSCO company, is intended for developing countries whose institutions have requested access. Researchers from those countries can search for open access journals, as well as those available under special programmes, such as AGORA, HINARI, OARE. Over 13,000 scientific journals are available via an institutional subscription.  

ROAD (Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources) is a portal for open access scientific and scholarly resources. This free service is offered by the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) Centre, in liaison with the UNESCO Information and Communication Sector. It lists over 47,000 resources, mostly journals, from different countries, in different languages, covering all scientific fields. It provides access to full Open Access journals.

SciELo is a free cooperative portal for scientific literature, mainly from Latin America, but also the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal and South Africa. It provides access to full-text journals covering all scientific fields. SciELo provides bibliographical and editorial information, notoriety indicators and citations for the journals. It also provides access to over 884,000 journal articles. The articles proposed are mainly in Spanish. 
The search interface is also in Portuguese and English. 

CoopIST (Cooperate in scientific and technical information) is a CIRAD website accessible free of charge. It offers resources in several fields, including research data management, and especially advice notes such as "Writing and publishing a data paper", "Depositing data in a repository",  "Citing a dataset", etc. [French-language resource]

DoRANum is a free platform proposing numerous self-training resources in research data management and sharing. The diversity of resources caters for the expectations of several publics: researchers, teachers-researchers, PhD students and information professionals. This service associates the URFIST network (regional scientific and technical information training units) and Inist-CNRS, along with representatives of the higher education and research community. [French-language resource]

re3data is a free registry of over 2,000 data repositories throughout the world, either non-specialist, by subject matter, or by discipline. re3data enables researchers to find a repository to deposit their research data, but also to identify repositories likely to provide data suited to their own research. The selection criteria include: subject, country, language, content type, data deposit conditions, type of data access, type of dissemination licences, etc.  re3data is recommended by numerous journal publishers and providers of scientific project funding for selecting appropriate repositories. 

Data Portals is a registry of open data portals from around the world. It was developed in 2011 by Open Knowledge Foundation and many international, national, regional, or local organizations and institutions contribute to it. 

This web page provides open access to resources (advice, videos, examples, tools, suitable journals, etc.) on data paper publishing, notably for biodiversity data. The information is proposed by GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) in English or on the GBIF France website (Système mondial d'Information sur le Biodiversité) in French. http://www.gbif.fr/page/contrib/publier-un-datapaper [French-language resource]

The Electronic Journals Library (EZB-The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek) is a service to facilitate access to scholarly journals held by over 620 organizations (in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Slovakia). A structured and unified interface provides free access to full-text articles from over 70,000 journals. The interface offers a search by journal title and displays journal lists classed by research field. Full-text access options are displayed for each journal: open access, access restricted to institutions with a subscription to the journal, access limited to certain articles, no access. This site is run by the Max Planck Society.

This free website simplifies access to over 4,500 French-language journals, mainly in the human and social sciences. For each journal, Mir@bel provides links to the full on-line text, contents, abstracts or indexing of articles, along with access to numerous complementary sites. It offers links to  the Sherpa Romeo site to ascertain the editorial policy of publishers regarding self-archiving rights. Mir@bel was created by Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH Dijon) and Sciences PO Grenoble and Lyon. [French-language resource]

JSTOR is a selective digital library of scientific and scholarly contents covering different formats, languages and disciplines (human and social sciences, natural sciences). The collections include over 2,600 journals published by more than 1,200 publishers in 57 countries. JSTOR also offers more than 10,000 ebooks, including 6,500 in free open access. The search is by title, publisher, subject (Explore JSTOR). Access authorized via a library or institution.

This freely accessible database covers around 40,000 scholarly journals in all disciplines and provides information on journal content and subject areas.  It provides a link to the journal website and identifies the standard abbreviated title of the journal (OCLC-WorldCat). The search enables rapid identification of potential journals in which authors can publish their research, and also find new journals of interest to their field.

Online information system for over 29,400 scientific journals in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. Several criteria are proposed for a journal search: title, subject, region, publisher, country. The list of results indicates if the journal exists in open access. [Spanish-language resource]

Redalyc is a free indexing system providing access to 1,420 scientific journals published by 691 organizations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal, as well as Germany and Poland. All scientific fields are covered. Over 700,000 articles are freely accessible. A search by journal provides access to the list of articles published, the journal content, instructions to authors, notoriety indicators (Journal Metrics) and a link to the journal's website. The Journal Collections section offers a search for open access journals by field, country, or institution.

List of journals analysed in Elsevier's multidisciplinary database  Scopus, i.e. over 38,500 peer-reviewed scientific journals, including 6,300 in open access. Scopus offers a notoriety indicator for each journal: SCImago Journal Rank (see "Journal Notoriety" section).

List of all the journals indexed in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science, with an impact factor or awaiting attribution. The site offers a search by journal title or the downloading of  3 list in PDF format for the Arts and Humanities, Science, and Social Sciences fields.

The ARDI programme, coordinated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) with its partners in the publishing sector, aims to increase the availability of scientific and technical information in developing countries. By improving access to scholarly literature from diverse fields of science and technology, ARDI seeks to reinforce the capacity of developing countries to participate in the global knowledge economy and support researchers in those countries to create and develop new solutions to technical challenges faced on a national and international level. To date, more than 100 publishers provide access to approximately 30,000 periodicals, books and reference sources for 120 developing countries and territories. This program is part of the Research4Life partnership, along with four other programs: AGORA, OARE, HINARI and GOALI.

The AGORA programme, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain free online access to a collection in the fields of  food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides institutions in over 115 countries with a collection of 15,500 journals and  48,000 books published in  55 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the thousands of students, teachers and researchers in agriculture and the life sciences. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE, ARDI and GOALI.  The AGORA programme offers training, online courses (MOOCs), webinars and videos.

The Hinari programme set up by WHO together with major publishers enables low- and middle-income countries to gain access to thousands of journals, books and other information sources in the biomedical and health fields: over 41,000 journals, 12,900 books, 16 databases, 139 publishers. Hinari is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE, ARDI and GOALI.

The OARE programme, set up by WHO together with major publishers, enables low- and middle-income countries to gain access free of charge to thousands of  journals, books and other information sources in a wide range of disciplines contributing to our understanding of the natural environment, including environmental toxology and pollution, ecology, geography, environmental economics, environmental law, conservation, environmental engineering, energy and many others :over 36,000 journals, 13,000 books, 18 databases, 124 publishers. OARE is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE, ARDI and GOALI.

The BioOne portal is a database of over 200 open access scientific books and journals in the biological, ecological and environmental sciences, published by scholarly societies, museums, associations, etc. The portal offers access to full text, by paid subscription, to academic establishments and libraries, non-academic organizations, societies and government agencies. BioOne offers societies, associations, institutions and other non-profit publishing organizations the possibility of improving the visibility and dissemination of their journal, with the possibility of earning an annual royalty for participating publishers (Publish With BioOne).

The GOALI programme offers access to academic journals and major peer-reviewed specialized journals, publications and databases on law and the social sciences, incorporating disciplines such as politics, economics, philosophy, history and many more subjects: over 16,000 journals, 2,300 books, 10 databases, 112 publishers. GOALI is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE, ARDI and GOALI.

The French portal Persée offers access to full journal collections, conference proceedings, scientific series and books in the sciences and social sciences. It contains  300 collections amounting to over 700,000 documents. Persée advocates and fosters open dissemination of  metadata and full texts in agreement with publishers. The portal also provides open access to articles, except in the event of embargo periods, which can vary from 2 to 5 years depending on the journal publisher. Persée is produced by the French Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research, CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the Ecole Nationale des Sciences (ENS-Lyon).
Depending on the collection period in question, some journals may be distributed by Persée, OpenEdition Journals and CAIRN, with different conditions of access to the full text (open or restricted access). [French-language resource]

The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) programme, coordinated by WIPO together with its partners in the publishing industry, works to facilitate access to scientific and technical information in developing countries. To date, over 100 publishers enable 120 developing countries and territories to access around 30,000 journals, books and reference sources through the ARDI programme. This programme is part of the Research4Life partnership with 4 other programmes: AGORA, OARE, HINARI and GOALI. 

Erudit is an initiative of the universities of Montreal, Quebec and Laval, promoting and disseminating French-language resources in the human and social sciences. This collaborative portal provides centralized access to the contents of over 30 fields in the human and social sciences: over  150 scholarly and cultural journals, books, proceedings, dissertations and theses, along with a variety of research documents and data. The information presented for each journal include  description, field, editorial policy, access policy, distribution format.  Erudit proposes 200,000 documents accessible via a single point of access.  Erudit thus supports research in the social and human sciences and promotes French-language publication of research.

Cairn.info is a portal offering references and scientific articles in the human, social and political sciences. The initiative was launched by 4 publishing houses (Belin, De Boeck, La Découverte and Erès), which have since been joined by many others in the aim of developing online access to French-Language scientific literature. The site provides access to article abstracts from more than 550 journals and to full-text articles dating back 2 to 5 years (depending on the journal).
Depending on the collection period in question, some journals may be distributed by Persée, OpenEdition Journals and CAIRN, with different conditions of access to the full text (open or restricted access).