As a researcher, choosing where to publish and how to promote your research is critical. Strategic scholarly publishing involves following a systematic approach to ensure you publish in the most effective outlet and maximise success in publishing endeavours. This will help raise your academic profile, increase the visibility and impact of your work and add to the reputation of UQ as a world class research institution and contribute to scholarly discussions in your field.

3. Check

Mandate compliance 

It is your responsibility to ensure that your choice of publishing outlet will fulfill mandatory requirements and academic standards. It is best to understand what these requirements are, and how they will affect your publishing decisions, before you submit your article to a journal. Some of the types of mandates or standards which you will be subject to are:

For example, you may have to fulfill requirements related to research data or open access. 

Research data

Research data is an important part of research outputs. Research data may include methods, data files, software, code, transcripts and more.  You will need to check if the journal requires you to submit your data, and if you can make your data underpinning publications available. Publishing your research data can lead to: 

  • increased chances to be published
  • facilitating the validation and verification of results
  • increased visibility through the exposure of research outcomes
  • higher citation rate for both data and publications
  • generating new collaborations
  • minimising research-waste (null results).

 Research Data (YouTube, 3m5s) shows simple ways to share your research data.

If the journal requires you to link to your data, you may like to publish your data in a repository such as UQ eSpace.

Manage your research data has more information about publishing data and information about data storage, security, retention and sharing policies at UQ. If your project involved gaining ethical clearance, before you share any data, make sure you have the relevant ethics approval to share the data.

Open access and article processing charges (APCs)

Funders may require you to make your research open access. It is important to check what the requirements are for your research and also to remember that, as a UQ researcher, you will also need to abide by the UQ Open Access Policy which requires researchers to make publications from their research openly available via UQ eSpace. Find out more about open access, UQ eSpace and APCs.

It is very important to be informed about whether there will be APCs due when you submit your article to an open access publisher. Before you commit to paying an APC you must be aware of why the journal is charging for you to publish your research article. There may be no requirement at all for you to pay an APC.  As a UQ Researcher you can choose to make the author accepted version of your manuscript available via the institutional repository, UQ eSpace, under the Green open access model and avoid paying ANY article processing charges. 

Go to UQ eSpace to find open access articles in your discipline. Are they published in hybrid or fully open access journals?