Learn about Preprint server, Open Access Journals, and Gold Open Access.
Preprints and Open Access
Preprints
Preprints are a great for getting your work out in the world as soon as possible. A preprint typically is publishing your scientific manuscript on a preprint server before it underwent peer review. Some servers provide a brief quality-control but usually your preprint is available within a day for anyone to read without any charges. You can also update your preprint, e.g., after you received some feedback in it or included more data. The first version of your preprint usually stays available on the server to preserve the scholarly record. Before posting a preprint, you should check the terms and conditions on preprints with the journal you would like to submit the manuscript to for peer review and publication. Information about the policies of different journals is collected at Sherpa Romeo. As preprints are becoming more and more popular, most journals allow submissions of manuscript that have been published as a preprint. Popular preprint servers for psychology and neuroscience are arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv, and the OSF.
Open Access publishing
The Open Access movement not only fostered the popularity of preprints but also reinforced Journals to become Open Access. Publishing Open Access basically just means that your article can be accessed by anyone without any charges under the DOI provided by the publishing journal. You can find Open Access Journals (OAJs) of any field in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) search engine. For example, if you search for “psychology”, the DOAJ presents you with 1,325 indexed OAJs. Sometimes you’ll find the term “Gold Open Access”. Here, you have to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to the journal so that your article becomes Open Access to others. APCs are usually around 2,000 USD which is also the biggest criticism regarding the Gold Open Access route. For example, just recently more than 40 editors of the popular neuroscience Journal NeuroImage resigned because they all found the APCs to be “(…) unethical and unsustainable.” (Smith, lead editor of NeuroImage; see report on it here), as the charges are 3,450 USD. Usually, your institution has some agreements with journals (e.g., DEAL) that reduces the APC or substitutes if fully. Your local university library is happy to consult you on this (e.g., University Marburg Open Access; Publikationsfonds).