Publishing your work on Indigenous Health issues means balancing the needs of your audience, your work, and your own professional and personal goals. Here are some qualities of a journal to consider:
A lot of academic journals are "paywalled", meaning a user needs to belong to an institution which pays a subscription fee, or they personally will have to pay a subscription fee for access. This frequently means that Indigenous communities cannot access research for, on, or about themselves.
An alternative to paywalled journals are "open access" journals, which use a variety of licenses or institutional supports to make their journals and articles freely accessible to anyone online. To learn more, contact Devon or check out this guide on scholarly publishing, or this guide sub-section on open access licensing (creative commons).
Not only will knowing your intended audience help you navigate whether you need an open access journal, it will also help you figure out if the folks you want reading your article will actually find the journal you are considering. Think about whether your work needs to be in a specific society journal, or a more interdisciplinary, or even international publication. Perhaps you want to consider a completely different method of disseminating your findings like a social media campaign or video production.
Traditionally, upon publishing, authors would sign over copyright over their intellectual property to the journal publisher. This meant they could not publish that same work elsewhere, and it might even impact different kinds of dissemination of the same research. Recently, new models of publication have emerged which allow authors to publish in a journal while retaining their intellectual property rights (creative commons licenses are one pathway). This information can be hard to find a journal website, but some state it in the submission information. You can also try to puzzle it out by looking at the licensing info on published articles in a journal you are considering.
These journals are mostly not listed in traditional academic journal article databases such as PubMed or CINAHL. This means that you will need to separately search each journal website (in addition to other database searches you might carry out) in order to be sure to include that journal in your search. You can double-check whether a journal is indexed in a database either by searching for the journal in the database (most have a list of journals they index), or by going to the journal website (typically the About page), and looking to see if they state where the journal is indexed.
These journals are mostly not listed in traditional academic journal article databases such as PubMed or CINAHL. This means that you will need to separately search each journal website (in addition to other database searches you might carry out) in order to be sure to include that journal in your search. You can double-check whether a journal is indexed in a database either by searching for the journal in the database (most have a list of journals they index), or by going to the journal website (typically the About page), and looking to see if they state where the journal is indexed.