Choosing a Publisher: Finding the Perfect Home for your Scholarship

In this session Jennifer Collins, Scholarly Communications and OER librarian, will provide practical strategies for evaluating publishers and journals, understanding key publishing models, and identifying common factors such as audience, reputation, peer review, indexing, copyright, open access options, and author rights. Selecting the right publisher for your work is about having the right fit. Choosing which publisher to work with can influence what kind of visibility, impact, accessibility, and long term reach your scholarly output has. This session is meant to help scholars of all levels make informed and empowered decisions about where are how to disseminate your scholarly output.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Evaluate publishers and journals based on the following: scope, audience, reputation, and scholarly impact.
• Compare publishing models like open access, hybrid, and traditional publishing.
• Identify and be mindful of common characteristics of predatory publishers and how to avoid them.
• How to reach out to the library and use library resources to support informed publishing decisions. This includes information on copyright, author rights, and journal overviews.