Editing a Scholarly Journal: Publishing an Open Access Journal

The Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing outline guidelines for ethical and transparent scholarly publishing. Key principles include clear website information, copyright and licensing policies, publication ethics, peer review processes, access details, ownership transparency, editorial team information, and business practices. The guidelines emphasise the importance of integrity, accessibility, and inclusivity in scholarly publishing.

DOAJ was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals. In 2025, DOAJ contains over 21,000 open access journals covering all subjects.

Wiki with links to information about various aspects of open access - one of the most comprehensive OA resources available.

The OA Journals Toolkit provides guidance for new and established open access journals to navigate the rapidly changing scholarly publishing landscape.

OASPA is a membership organization that was established in 2008 in order to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. One of the core goals of OASPA is to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant model of publication for scholarly outputs.

SPARC is an advocacy organization that aims to improve access to research. UNLV is a SPARC member organization.

Typically recommended for authors as they evaluate journals, editors may also consider using this resource to ensure their journal is providing the information authors are looking for.

Requests for new journals for Digital Scholarship@UNLV are temporarily on hold (Spring 2025), but are expected to resume by Fall 2025.

Digital Scholarship@UNLV is hosted on the Digital Commons platform. Learn about journal design options from Elsevier's Digital Commons.

Developed by the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California, "this guide is aimed at anyone, but it is specifically designed for scholars (faculty, students, professional researchers) from all disciplines who are involved in editing or managing journals and are considering transitioning their affiliated journals to OA."

Publishers may implement a Subscribe to Open (S2O) model of publishing. "S2O allows publishers to convert journals from subscriptions to OA, one year at a time. Using S2O, a publisher offers a journal’s current subscribers continued access. If all current subscribers participate in the S2O offer (simply by not opting out) the publisher opens the content covered by that year’s subscription." If the threshold is not met, content for that year remains paywalled.