Scholarly Publishing

International Open Access Week was October 20-26, 2025.

Thank you all for participating in UND Libraries' workshops, reception, and other activities!

Below you will see a recording of the SMHS Library Resources' OA Week workshop for this year, "Open Access 101", as well as a link to our 2025 OA Week zine, a record of our other activities, and general resources on open access scholarship.

The results of the Publication Pandemonium online quiz competition are in!  

We are now in the second year of holding this quiz in celebration of International Open Access Week, which seeks to elevate dialogue around research access and ownership. Our quiz is meant to be educational and fun, focusing on core concepts within scholarly communications as well as current events in the research world, and while it’s no small feat, we had an impressive turnout with 132 SMHS folks participating! 

The first prize we award in our quiz competition is a Program Participation Prize, where the program with the highest percentage of their enrolled students participating with a passing grade receives a prize of $500 towards open access publication. This year’s Program Participation Prize winner is: Biomedical Sciences, who had 39.02% of their enrolled student body participate!  

 We award three prizes for high scores, also, with all winning UND merchandize, and the 1st place winner additionally securing a $500 open access funding prize. This year we had multiple people with the same score, so winners were chosen at random from the top three scores, which were 90% (25 people), 80% (40 people), and 70% (28 people). 

Third Place Top-Score Winner is: Laura Sawney 

Second Place Top-score Winner is: Jessica Craig 

First Place Top Score Winner is: Gretchen Anderson 

Special Honorable Mention must also go to Dr. Sahmoun, who is the first person ever to get a perfect score, but is ineligible to win first place as he is not a student ;). Very well done, Dr. Sahmoun! 

Congratulations to all of our winners, and our heartfelt thanks to you all for participating in our second-annual Publication Pandemonium and other Open Access Week 2025 events. We are just chuffed that so many SMHS folks took us up on this challenge. 

And last but not least, a very sincere thank you to SMHS Education Affairs and Research Affairs for funding the prizes for our quiz competition! 

2025 Publication Pandemonium Quiz questions and answers

1. What does "APC" stand for in open access publishing?
   1. "author publication charges" (correct)
   2. "article publication charges" (also correct)
2. What does "open access" mean?

   1. Articles or textbooks that are only available to subscribers or paying users

   2. Materials that are only shared within a specific institution

   3. Research materials that anyone can access and download for free, without a paywall (correct)

   4. Publications that require special software to view

3. Which of the following activities is generally covered under Fair Use in the U.S.?

   1. Copying an entire textbook and selling it online

   2. Using a short excerpt from a book in a research paper for commentary (correct)

   3. Posting full movies on a website without permission

   4. Translating a copyrighted novel and publishing it for profit

4. Name two publishers that we have transformative agreements with. (all below are correct options)

   1. Cambridge University Press

   2. Oxford University Press

   3. Springer Nature

   4. Association for Computing Machinery

   5. The Company of Biologists

   6. IOP Publishing

   7. Royal Society of Chemistry

   8. Taylor & Francis

5. What are the two most common types of Open Access publishing?

   1. Gold Open Access and Green Open Access (correct)

   2. Silver Open Access and Bronze Open Access

   3. Paid Open Access and Free Open Access

   4. Platinum Open Access and Diamond Open Access

6. In academic publishing, what is an embargo?

   1. A fee authors pay to make their work Open Access

   2. A period of time during which access to a published work is restricted before it becomes freely available (correct)

   3. A type of Open Access license

   4. A requirement to publish in multiple journals simultaneously

7. What is “Fair Use,” and how can it help students or researchers use copyrighted materials legally in their work?

   1. A legal loophole which allows students to upload clips of Taylor Swift’s new album to their social media feeds.

   2. A legal loophole which allows reuse of copyrighted material for the purposes of commentary, education, etc.(correct)

   3. A precursor to copyright established in 1809 which allowed reuse of materials by non-voting landholders

   4. A legal loophole which allows students to photocopy physical textbooks and sell the copies to their classmates

8. Which of the following AI-related scenarios is an illustration of stealing copyrighted work via AI use?

   1. Use Claude.ai to generate an image of a splinted leg

   2. Using an AI image processor to remove the watermark from a copyrighted image

   3. Using AI to generate a poster-sized image of Lilo and Stitch for your work station

   4. All of the above (correct)

9. What type of legal license supports open access publishing?

   1. Traditional copyright

   2. Tortes

   3. Patents

   4. Creative commons (correct)

10. When is International Open Access Week celebrated each year?

    1. The first week of October

    2. The last full week of October (correct)

    3. The first week of November

    4. December 1–7

2025 Open Access Week Activities

What does "open access" mean?

Most often, "open access" refers to journal articles, textbooks, or class content that anyone can access from anywhere. In other words, it isn't kept behind a paywall, anyone can download it for free.

• Open access journals are often funded by fees charged to authors. This is because open access journals do not follow the traditional funding model, where subscribers (like universities) pay to access journal articles:

“The largest open access publishers, BioMed Central and PLoS, charge $1,350-2,250 per article in most cases”.¹  However, UND is a supporter of BioMed Central, and so UND faculty receive a 15% discount (ask your librarian about this discount).

• Open access publication is beginning to become an accepted way to fulfill the requirements of promotion and tenure. See this CFL page for information on the "UND OA Statement of Support", proposed and passed by the University Senate Library Committee in May 2018, and passed by Senate Executive on 9/19/18.
• Open access journals vary in quality (just like traditional journals): some are reputable, some are insufficiently rigorous, and some are deceptive.². (see checklist below). 

What "open access" doesn't mean:

• Being open access doesn't mean a resource is copyright-free.

example: A journal can take an article for which it retains the copyright and make it open access if they don't charge people for downloading it.

• Being open access doesn't mean a resource has a creative commons license, rather than a traditional copyright license (though it is likely).
• Being open access doesn't mean a resource is of poor quality (see checklist below)

references:   

1. Van Noorden, Richard. (March 27 2013). “Open Access: The true cost of science publishing.” Nature. http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

2. Berger, Monica. (March 22-25 2017).  “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Predatory Publishing but were Afraid to Ask.” ACRL 2017: At the Helm: Leading Transformation. http://bit.ly/2gO47AZ

 -sparcopen.org/open-access/

Types of Open Access:

Platinum open access journals, also referred to as diamond or sponsored journals, do not charge authors to publish, and also do not charge readers to read their articles. Instead, these journals are financially supported by an organization, often a university of non-profit.

Hybrid open access journals publish both open access and paywalled articles. Typically, these are journals which in the past used to be entirely paywalled and are owned by for-profit-publishers, who are now capitalizing on the market for open access publishing by allowing authors to pay to lower the paywall which would traditional limit readers' access to their article.

Deceptive Journal Red Flag Checklist

Look for these red flags when considering whether a journal is deceptive* or worthy of your trust, and contact your librarian if you have any questions!

***NOTE: Some untrustworthy journals are willfully deceptive, while others are simply of lower quality. Further, many legitimate journals may lack the gloss of more established and well-known journals. It is important to be aware of the resource disparities operating within the journal publishing industry, and the significant infrastructural disadvantages at which less monied journals, particularly those in the Global South, operate. Less than stellar English is not always a meaningful indicator, and journals may lack an ISSN, indexing, or impact factor, and still be reputable and legitimate.

1) A suspicious email soliciting papers is a red flag signaling that a journal's main aim is to make a profit, rather than promote academic research. Look out for:

• unprofessional language
• flattery and bogus personalization
• promises of fast peer review and fast publication

2) Does anything about the journal or publisher seem misleading?

• journal name suspiciously similar to another prominent and respected journal in the field
• lack of full contact information in email or on website
• falsified location- Look up the listed address on Google Maps and see if the publisher is actually located there. Does it look like a reputable location where a publisher might be located?

>below you see that the listed location for the journal "Annals of Physiotherapy Clinics" is very suspicious indeed:

3) Does the journal or publisher's website seem unprofessional?

• typos, advertisements, and dead links or sections that are "under development"
• lack of an "About" section
• excessive or aggressive advertisements, no stated ad policy
• excessive use of stock photos, or suspiciously generic, glossy graphics, as you see below:

4) Is important information about the journal or publisher unclear?

• author fees are unclear
• no clear instruction to authors
• no clear statement explaining peer review process
• lack of information about the ownership and/or management of a journal
• lack of statement explaining the journal's business model
• lack of clear stated policies on handling potential conflicts of interest or research misconduct
• lack of a clearly stated publication schedule
• lack of copyright and licensing information

5) Is the editorial board reputable?

• are the members of the editorial board listed, with full contact information?
• are the members of the editorial board qualified?
  • Feel free to contact editors and ask about their experience with the journal and publisher.

> below you see an image of a suspicious journal's editorial board and an image of a college webite's faculty directory, which refutes the journal's claim that one of their editors works for that college:

6) Are the articles published in previous issues high quality?

• look out for a large number of published articles written by a small amount of people
• evaluate the published articles
  • Contact past authors to ask about their experience with the journal or publisher.

7) Is the journal searchable in major databases, such as PubMed and CINAHL? Contact your librarian for help.

8) Look up the journal's impact metrics. Contact your librarian for help.