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Advanced Information Research Skills

What and where to publish

Writing for publication requires a higher academic standard than writing an undergraduate essay or project report. While undertaking your research degree you may publish one or more of the following: 

  • a research report 
  • a conference paper
  • a journal article


Background references

Publishing in a high ranking journal or conference proceedings is important. However, there is intense competition to publish in high impact journals. Consult with your supervisory team and peers for further advice.

Scimago is a portal that includes journals' scientific indicators developed from information contained in Elsevier’s Scopus® database. The Scimago Journal Rank is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals from which the citations have come. These journal quality indicators can help to: 

  • identify journals in which to publish 
  • identify journals relevant to your research 
  • confirm the status of journals in which you have published. 

Scimago provides links to the journal homepage and how to publish in the journal. Find out more information on publication metrics from our research impact page linked below.

The Australian Government’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative produces a list of journals organised by ‘fields of research’ through extensive consultation with discipline experts, academic peak bodies and members of the public.

You may be invited to submit a paper to be published as:  

  • a book chapter  
  • an article in a special edition of a journal (usually on a particular topic) 
  • an entry in an encyclopaedia. 

These opportunities are particularly valuable because you know in advance that your work will be accepted for publication as long as your writing meets editorial standards. Being part of a larger collaborative writing project improves your writing, builds your research track record and increases your impact factor.

Be wary of email invitations from print-to-order publishing companies to have your thesis published as a ‘book’. This form of publishing is generally considered to be ‘self-publishing’ and attracts little or no prestige within the academic community. Furthermore, the publishing agreement terms may constrain your right to re-use your own work.

Your completed thesis will be published online via ResearchOnline@ND. This means that it will be discoverable via search engines and may be cited by other researchers. You retain copyright ownership of your thesis and the power to grant others non-exclusive rights to use all or parts of it.
 

Think, Check, Submit is a website aimed at researchers who want to get their work published, whether it's in a journal or a book. The site provides a series of checklists to help you consider the quality and reputation of a publisher/publication regardless of the discipline or format. 
Their companion site, Think, Check, Attend is to help you consider the legitimacy, authenticity and appropriateness of conference so you can decide on whether to attend.

Open Access (OA) is free, immediate, unrestricted and permanent online access to peer reviewed journal articles, theses, scholarly books and book chapters worldwide.

OA content can be found by general search engines such as Google. The academic search engine BASE includes over 167 million open access documents from 8,000+ academic sources including the University of Notre Dame Australia. National portals such as the National Library of Australia's Trove also provide an access point for region-specific open access content.

OA is important because it exposes your research to a wider audience thus increasing the possibility that it will be read, used and cited by other researchers and/or practitioners worldwide. Many studies have shown across all fields that journal articles made freely accessible to all are cited significantly more than articles that are accessible only to subscribers (Gargouri, 2010).

SHERPA/RoMEO provides summaries of the rights retained by authors under the terms of the standard agreement contracts used by hundreds of publishers. You can search these databases to find a journal or publisher at a specified level of open access.

ResearchOnline@ND is The University of Notre Dame Australia's open access institutional research repository. The goal of the repository is to:

  • capture and preserve the intellectual output of Notre Dame authors and researchers
  • promote intellectual inquiry, research and cross-disciplinary collaboration
  • provide open access to Notre Dame research and outputs

ResearchOnline raises the visibility and accessibility of Notre Dame's publications to local and international audiences, and provides data for mandatory Government reporting requirements such as the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). It operates as an institutional repository for open access research publications, including Notre Dame's Higher Degree by Research electronic thesis collection, and as a publishing platform for University-endorsed eJournals.

Notre Dame Higher Degree by Research students completed theses will be published online via ResearchOnline@ND under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This means that while the thesis can be downloaded, read and cited by others, the student owns the copyright. If anyone wants to republish or use the thesis commercially or create a derivative work (for example, a translation), they are legally required to seek your permission first. If you subsequently publish a journal article which includes a figure (for example) you created for your thesis, remember to reference your thesis as the original source and include the CC licence information. This continues to protect your ownership of that figure even when copyright in the article is transferred to the publisher.

Open access journals provide immediate open access to the full content of each issue. Most open access journals publish articles under a Creative Commons licence. Some open access journals charge fees (article processing charges) that must be paid by the author or the author's institution. However, many open access journals are free to authors (and readers) as they are fully funded by a host university (acting as a publisher) or a scholarly society. The Directory of Open Access Journals provides details of over 10,000 open access scholarly journals

The University participates in national Read and Publish Agreements (also known as Transformational Agreements) with key publishers which enable NDA staff and HDRs to publish in open access journals and have the article processing charge (APC) waived.  Current NDA staff members can also enquire about institutional funding, specifying their intention to use some of that funding for subsidising article processing charges to publish in an open access (OA) journal.