Scholarly Publishing  

Choosing a journal to publish in requires consideration of a number of factors including:

• Journal quality.  Is it peer reviewed?  What ERA ranking does it have?  What is the journal's impact factor? 
• What are the publisher's policies on Open Access and self-archiving?
• How long does it take from submission to publication?

If you share information, you end up with more of it. Providing Open Access to research literature may increase the rate of knowledge generation and knowledge transfer. If you remove the cost barrier, your research output can accessed by the widest possible audience.

Recent research indicates that Open Access significantly increases the likelihood that an article will be cited. This is becoming increasingly important now that bibliometrics feature so prominently in research assessment exercises.

The provision of "Open Access" to research literature is generally understood to mean free online access to copies of peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, theses and working papers.

It is not self-publishing nor a way to bypass the peer review process.  Open Access is simply a means of making traditional research publications available to all would-be readers.

Open Access can be provided by various means but the two main options are:

• publishing in Open Access journals eg BioMed Central , Public Library of Science journals and Hindawi Publishing.
• "self-archiving" copies of published articles in Open Access archives or repositories eg QUT ePrints. 

For more information please refer to The Joint Information Systems Committee Open Access page.

Where the author chooses to publish in a subscription-based journal, the article would normally only be available to subscribers of that journal.  This means that the article is only reaching a subset of potential readers. However, when the author also self-archives a copy of the article in an open access repository, those without a subscription will also have access to the work. QUT ePrints is an example of an open access repository.