Where to publish

Scholarly journals are mostly peer-reviewed periodicals. Exchange of information through journals has a long history as one of the main modes of formal scholarly and scientific communication. Journals differ widely in scope, topic and perspective, usually with different emphasis on methodological, theoretical or topical aspects within a given field of research. Your supervisor, or other senior colleagues, may be able to advise you on your choice of journals in which to publish your PhD work.

The questions above may help you find a suitable journal for your research. The Norwegian register is the source to decide whether a journal is accepted as academic or not. If you need help, the research support services at your library will assist you.

When it comes to book publishing, the most likely scenarios if you are a PhD candidate, at least in the social sciences or humanities, are

• to revise your dissertation from thesis to published monograph
• to write a monograph separate from the dissertation
• to contribute a chapter to an anthology or edited book

If you are contributing to an anthology, you probably do not have to worry about choosing a publisher. But if you are planning a monograph, your initial job will be to identify the publisher most relevant to your research field. Today most academic publishers have a diverse publishing profile and will publish books in many disciplines. It may be smart to identify a book series that is likely to have an impact in your field. Some publishers offer open access options for authors to publish their research. If you are planning to publish your book or your book chapter open access, you should check if it is possible to apply for funding at your institution.

Conferences are excellent venues for meeting research colleagues from around the world. Networking at conferences can provide valuable feedback for your research and help you find opportunities for collaboration. Conference participation can take several forms. The most important ones are:

• Posters: These tend to be the first published efforts of a budding researcher.
• Papers: These usually take the form of an oral presentation. You may be required to submit an abstract before the conference, or in some cases a full paper.
• Proceedings: You may be invited or required to submit a full paper for publication in the conference proceedings. The proceedings may also contain abstracts and posters from the conference.

As a rule, posters and presentations go under the category of pre-publications, therefore they can be subsequently developed into ‘full version’ papers or articles and published as such in a journal. Some Conference proceedings are also regarded as a publication channel. If you are invited to publish in Conference proceedings, check out if this publication platform is registered as an accepted academic channel in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers. If not, you should consider a different venue for publishing your research. 

There is also a growing arena of subject-specific social media where online conferences are established. Once you have identified an interesting conference, sign up to receive notifications on abstract submission and registration deadlines, etc. Conference fees are common, make sure that you can provide funding for your participation.

HOW DO YOU FIND RELEVANT CONFERENCES IN YOUR FIELD?

As your PhD work is drawing to an end, you will put the finishing touches to your dissertation. Dissertations in medicine, natural sciences and some disciplines in the social sciences are mostly article-based, while in the humanities and law, dissertations are commonly presented as monographs, although the number of article-based dissertations is increasing here as well. 

The articles you have published, or are about to publish, must be reprinted in the dissertation. The rights for reprinting the articles in your dissertation have to be cleared with the journal publisher. Your dissertation will be published by your university and made available either in print, online or both. If you choose to make it available online, this will ensure a permanent link to your work and give your readers ready access.

If you have written a monograph, you may also consider publishing a revised version of it as a book after your defence. Typically, this entails transforming your dissertation, written for experts in your particular field, into a book that would attract a broader (although still academic) audience. In this case, you have to prepare your dissertation as a book manuscript in accordance with your chosen publisher’s guidelines. You normally also need to fill out a book proposal, where you, among other things, formulate an abstract and articulate its contribution to your field (see also Book publishing above). If the publisher decides to proceed with it, it will be sent to another round of peer review. 

Open access means unrestricted access to and unrestricted reuse of research publications. The main principles of open access are:

• Research publications are made available online for free.
• Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, share and (in most cases) build upon the full-text, as long as the original publication is properly cited and copyright is respected.
• The author retains the right to reuse his/her material.

Open access emerged as a global movement in the new millennium. The vision of Open access is founded on ideas such as solidarity with colleagues in poorer countries and that public funding of research should be to everyone’s benefit. In addition, studies show that research published Open access has a citation advantage (SPARC Europe, n.d.).

An important milestone with regard to Open Access was the announcement by cOAlition S of Plan S in 2018, according to which state-funded research must be made openly accessible to everyone. Plan S came into effect in 2021. Around 20 countries are members of the coalition, including Norway. The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research's goals and guidelines for open access state that all publicly funded research articles should be made openly available by 2024 (Government.no, 2017).

The Research Council of Norway operates with requirements in accordance with Plan S, which means that all journal articles stemming from projects funded by the council must be published Open Access with immediate effect. The European Research Council operates with similar requirements.

Regardless of who is funding your research, as an author affiliated with an academic institution in Norway you are expected to archive your articles in an online repository in order to contribute to the goals of Open Access and Open Science. Many institutions have an Open Access or Open Science Policy, which we recommend that you familiarize yourself with.

There are different ways of achieving open access:

1. Gold
   Gold means that open access is provided by the publisher. Publishing in an open journal, book or open articles in traditional journals ensures that the final version is made available open access, usually with a Creative Commons license that permits reuse. The author (usually the author’s institution or funder) might have to pay to publish (article or book processing charge/APC/BPC), but this varies from publisher to publisher. Non-commercial journals without APC, which are normally run by academic institutions, organisations or societies, are sometimes referred to as Diamond or Platinum Open Access.  
2. Green
   Green open access implies that peer reviewed publications (or even unpublished manuscripts) are made freely available in an institutional archive or some other repository. Depending on publisher copyright policies, you may submit the published, accepted or submitted version of your article to the repository. Green open access is also known as self-archiving (see below).
3. Hybrid
   Hybrid open access publishing means that you publish in a subscription journal but make the publisher’s version of your article open access for a fee. Note that your institution or funder may not support this kind of open access publishing.
4. Publish and Read agreements
   This term refers to a subscription deal between publishers and institutions, which includes open access publishing. In short, this deal grants you the right to publish your research as open access articles in the journal of your choice without paying any article processing fees. Note that such agreements are made for a specific period and need from time to time to be renegotiated. You will find updated and detailed information on all the agreements on the Openscience.no website. Here you can check whether your institution partakes in the agreement with a certain publisher. If it does, you should check if your preferred journal is included in the agreement. If it is, just follow the instructions for submitting articles, and make sure to choose the open access option.

Publishing open access can benefit you as a researcher. For instance, studies indicate that open access publications are downloaded, read and cited more often than other articles (McKiernan et al., 2016). 

If there is no suitable gold open access journal within your research field and no publish and read agreement apply, you can publish in a traditional subscription journal and archive the article in your institutional repository (Green Open Access or Self-archiving).  

Universities worldwide, beginning with Harvard University in 2008, have adopted their own rights retention policies. A rights retention policy allows their researchers to upload a manuscript version of their article in institutional repositories immediately upon publication, regardless of the embargo regulations of the publisher. Such policies ensure immediate open access to all journal articles. A majority of Norwegian academic institutions has adopted a right retention policy.  

Most universities and research institutions maintain an institutional repository, that is an in-house open research archive. As of 2025, Norwegian institutions have a joint archive in the Norwegian Research Information Repository (NVA).

When you have published a research article, you are normally expected to deposit a version of it in your institutional repository, and your institution will make it openly available. If your article is published in a subscription journal without a Publish and read agreement (see above) and thus not Open Access, you deposit a so-called post-print or author accepted manuscript (AAM) version, which will then become openly available to everyone. This is also known as Green Open Access

Versions of articles:

Pre-print / submitted. The manuscript version is either a draft or the version submitted to a journal. It is not peer-reviewed. Most publishers will allow manuscript versions of this kind to be self-archived.

Post-print / Author accepted manuscript (AAM). The final version of an article that has been accepted for publishing. It has been peer-reviewed, but has not been through final stage of proofreading and formatting. Most publishers will allow this version to be self-archived, though they might operate with an embargo period. 

Published. The publisher's version with the journal layout. The final formatted, published version. Most non-open-access publishers will not allow this version to be self-archived.

Many journals operate with an embargo period on self-archiving. Usually, the embargo period will be 6, 12 or 24 months after publishing, depending on the publisher. However, a majority of Norwegian academic institutions has adopted a rights retention policy that allows you to self-archive a manuscript version of your article as soon as it is published, regardless of the publisher’s own policies. 

Why archive your publications online?

• Access: More people will have access to research articles, online books and unpublished material.
• Searchability: The material is indexed by search engines, like Google and Google Scholar, and harvested by national and international databases and library catalogues.
• Archiving: Open repositories ensure long-term archiving with permanent links.
• Visibility: Institutional repositories can collect, make visible and promote an institution's research, while subject repositories can do the same within specific fields.
• Impact: By self-archiving your publications, you can increase its citation rate, thus enhancing its impact.
• Network and collaboration: You make your work accessible to broader audiences, which can lead to collaborative projects and joint publications.
• Policy: You comply with government and/or funding regulations.

Unless you are planning to publish your dissertation as a book, you are strongly encouraged to publish your entire dissertation in an open archive. Although there might be some restrictions for individual articles due to journal copyright policies, institutional rights retention policies guarantee that you at least can include post-print versions of your articles in your published dissertation. Articles that are still under peer-review at the time of your defense can be added later.

Some open access journals may be seen as 'predators'. Beware of those. They do not represent good research practice or offer proper editorial and peer-review procedures, but will happily take your money. How can you spot the predators? 
 
There is no entirely reliable way to spot predatory publishers. Early warning signs are promises of extremely fast review and email solicitations that are designed to flatter you. Other signs that should raise your suspicion are sloppy presentation of the website, unclear address, fuzzy information about the journal’s editorial board, or the difficulties in finding contact information. Usually, they are not found in the international Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or in the Norwegian register of approved scientific publication channels. Search the DOAJ and the register of channels for the journal’s name or ISSN number to check. Note that if a journal is not listed, this does not necessarily imply that the journal is predatory. 

In the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, serious, academic journals are placed on level 1 or 2. In addition, the Register has introduced a level x for journals where the quality is in doubt and that are currently under examination We advise you to stay clear of level x journal. It also happens that journals are downgraded directly to level 0. In addition to levels, check if users have posted any comments about the journal in the Register.  

The publishing industry is increasingly commercialized, and these processes may affect journals’ quality control in a negative way. Recently, even journals published by otherwise well-known publishers have come under scholarly and public scrutiny due to reports of bad scholarly practices, such as sloppy peer reviewing. Even though a given journal is currently considered a serious publication channel, such critique may affect its standing in the long run. 

Think. Check. Submit. helps you choose the right journal or publisher for your work.

Think. Check. Attend. helps you avoid predatory conferences.

The Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers

Directory of Open Access Journals – DOAJ

Directory of Open Access Books

Government.no. 2017. National goals and guidelines for open access to research articles. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/documents/national-goals-and-guidelines-for-open-access-to-research-articles/id2567591/

McKiernan, E. C., Bourne, P. E., Brown, C. T., Buck, S., Kenall, A., Lin, J., . . . Yarkoni, T. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed. eLife, 5, Article e16800. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800 

Ro, C. (2024). How to spot a predatory conference. Nature 632, 219–220. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02360-2  

SPARC Europe (n.d.). The Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA). https://sparceurope.org/what-we-do/open-access/sparc-europe-open-access-resources/open-access-citation-advantage-service-oaca/