The pressure to publish in prestigious subscription journals and commercial books is widely known and debated worldwide. Publication in journals and books indexed in commercial indexing services like Scopus and Web of Science is especially sought after due to citation counts and impact factors. Getting visibility in the global publishing landscape is especially difficult for African scholars. Many indexes favour the English language and have strict journal and book indexing criteria that require infrastructure and funds support.
In recent years Open Access publishing has increased in many regions, with policies, accreditation and quality checking increasing to ensure that the research published is open, trusted and accessible to the public. The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) has been around for 20 years as a trusted global index of almost 20,000 open access journals, and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) for ten years as a directory of well over 70,000 open access books.
DOAJ and DOAB provide internationally recognized quality-controlled indexes for open access journals and books, and government recognition of these Indexing Services will pave the way for a change in publishing culture.
The webinar aims to raise awareness of the importance of publishing research open access in local journals for policymakers, scholars and publishers in Nigeria.
- It will highlight the advantages of open access and discuss some open access publishing systems in place.
- It will outline why governments must take the first step and adapt their policies and reward systems to acknowledge local open access venues as valuable output. However, this will only be possible with proven quality assessment systems for open access journals and books.
- It will then explain the criteria and application procedures for DOAJ and DOAB and take questions from the audience.
Register here for the webinar.
Interested publishers can also sign up for an in-person training session on how their journals and books can leverage these indexing services at the LIBSENSE National Open Science Symposium in Abuja on September 14.