Abstract
Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology was launched in 2011 to provide clinicians and researchers in psychopharmacology a platform to publish their findings in a free-to-read format, thereby offering a universal access to latest information in the field. Since then, interest in open access (OA) publishing has greatly grown, and the journal will become fully gold OA from the beginning of 2019. Moreover, important advances have recently been made in giving authors and peer reviewers the credit they deserve for their contributions, as well as measuring the impact of research beyond citations.
Get kudos for your research and peer review activities
With 2.5 million articles being published each year, it is important to facilitate the discovery of research articles to maximise visibility, usage and citation. SAGE has partnered with Kudos, a third-party service that allows authors to explain, enrich and share their articles, and then measure the impact of their actions. You can find out more information about how to engage with your audience on the SAGE Journal author gateway. Moreover, SAGE has created a resource for authors to disseminate their articles in social media.
Although many authors still consider journal Impact Factor as important when choosing a journal to publish in, alternative, non-citation-based metrics are gaining momentum. These differ primarily in that they are article metrics rather than journal metrics, and measure the impact of the research mostly by assessing social media coverage. The UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) included a 20% component from these alternative metrics, of which Altmetrics is the main source, and this percentage is to increase substantially by the 2020 REF. The new hosting platform for Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology enables increased and immediate measuring of an article’s impact, which is now shown next to the articles online with links to what the metrics mean. If you click on the Altmetric icon next to the article title in full text view, it will take you to the full Article Metrics page where you will be given the percentage Attention Score, how many people have tweeted the article and where they are based, and how many Mendeley readers the article has. It also breaks the impact measures down further into types of usage, for example Twitter, blogs, news outlets and policy statements.
The increasing mobility between institutions necessitates a way of having an authenticated record of contribution to the scientific community as an author and peer reviewer. Authors of Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology are encouraged to use ORCID ID, a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from each other. ORCID is a non-profit organisation, and an ORCID ID is free to obtain.
Peer reviewers of the journal can now also get official credit for their contribution to the journal via Publons (www.publons.com). All reviewers are encouraged to register and create a reviewer profile at Publons, and they can opt in for receiving credit for their review when completing the peer review proces. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology can authenticate a reviewer automatically and, since Publons only publishes the year of the review and the journal title within the reviewer profiles, there is no breach of the journals’ single-blinded peer review system.
Advances in Open Access
Free access to research facilitates wider dissemination of latest research and clinical knowledge, as many clinicians and researchers — particularly those who work in developing countries — do not have an institutional access to journals and are not able afford personal subscriptions to journals. Moreover, free access to articles has been shown to increase article views and citations.
A large number of new gold (OA) journals have been launched in the past few years to provide immediate open access to research at the point of publication. 16% of peer-reviewed journals are now estimated to be gold OA. The gold OA articles use funding models that do not charge the reader or their institution for access.
The push towards OA publishing has been from government and research funders, as well as from the OA advocates within the scientific community, who argue that the availability of research results to all will speed up the progress of research and that if the taxpayer has paid for the research, they have the right to see the results. Some funders now require immediate access to the work at the point of publication, which is the Gold OA route. OA, as opposed to Free to View (Table 1), also requires an open copyright license of Creative Commons (CC).
Open access (OA) and related models.
The most notable initiative towards OA is the Plan S, announced in September 2018 by the cOAlition S, a group of European national research funding organisations supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC). The key principle of the Plan S is that by 1 January 2020, all scientific publications on the results from research funded by the cOAlition S must be published in compliant OA journals or on compliant OA platforms.
Although the hybrid model is still the most common model to publish articles OA, some funders — including the cOAlition S — require that research that they fund is published in journals that are fully gold OA, rather than in hybrid OA/subscription journals. Moreover, some argue that it is not fair for a hybrid journal to obtain funding from subscriptions and at the same time to obtain revenue from APCs on some of the articles — a process that is sometimes referred to as “double dipping”. SAGE sees value in this argument and therefore the subscription price of the journals SAGE publishes is lowered by the percentage of OA articles that are included in the journal.
To facilitate rapid dissemination of research and increase transparency, authors can submit their article to a preprint repository before submitting it to Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology. A preprint is an online-only, pre-peer reviewed version of a manuscript that is made openly available by posting it to a preprint server. Upon submission, authors are able to add the DOIs for any preprint versions of articles to ensure the original preprint version and the peer reviewed version published in Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology are linked together.
To enable instant access to journal articles, Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology no longer requires registration to read the articles, and the journal has now updated its contributor licenses to become fully gold (OA) from the beginning of 2019, meaning that it will comply with funder mandates that require publishing in full gold OA journals.
To fund immediate global free access to all articles, Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology charges an article publication charge (APC) that is payable upon acceptance. However, SAGE — the publisher of Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology — acknowledges the importance of disseminating the results of research, and the journal can grant full article fee waivers for authors who are genuinely unable afford publication fees owing to lack of institutional or personal grant funding. Moreover, SAGE supports the Research4Life scheme, meaning that authors from developing countries are usually eligible for article fee discounts or waivers. Authors are encouraged to contact the Managing Editor of the journal to enquire about these options.
