Where to Publish in the Health Sciences

Publishing your work in an open-access venue will help increase the impact of your research because it will be freely available to the public. Open-access publishing also provides practicing health professionals with free research that will help inform their clinical decisions. Another benefit of open-access publishing is that it allows you to keep copyright ownership of your work.

There are three options for publishing your article in a format that will be freely available. You can:

1. Submit your article to a journal that is open-access.
2. Elect to make a pre-print version of your article through an institutional repository or on your own website if the journal policy includes  this as an option.
3. Submit your article to a hybrid journal.

Please see the boxes below for more information about these three options.

Traditional, subscription based journals will sometimes allow authors to make "pre-publication" versions of their articles available on their professional websites or within an institutional repository. This allows a version of your article to be open-access. You can find out about your journal's policies regarding preprint articles from the Sherpa Romeo Website.

If your journal's editorial board allows you to put a prepublication version of your article in an institutional repository, we invite you to submit your paper to OpenBU, BU's own institutional Repository.

Hybrid Journals are traditional, subscription-based journals that offer authors the option of making their article open-access. Please be aware that these journals charge the author a publication fee for making their journal open-access. Journals from major publishers such as Wiley and Springer have an open-access option for authors.