Open access publishing

There are several challenges facing you if you want to publish your work in an open access venue. One is finding the funds necessary to cover publication charges, whether from a grant, institutional sources, or your own deep pockets. I'm afraid I can't help with that.

I can help, or rather Jonathan Eisen can help, with another problem - finding an Open Access journal where your paper fits. In one sense, that's not hard if your a biologist. PLoS One is an easy and obvious choice. PeerJ may be another, though it's still early days, and I'm enough of an old fuddy duddy not to be confident that it's going to work out.

Jonathan points out two ways for finding additional alternatives.

1. I already knew about the Directory of Open Access Journals, which aims to provide a directory for all Open Access journals that make their content freely available without delay.¹
2. I didn't know about JANE, the Journal Author Name Estimator. Jonathan explains how to use the "extra options" to find journals that have published papers using keywords (or an abstract) that you enter to identify open access journals with papers that match.
   
   I tried JANE using the abstract of our most recent Protea paper for the search. Here's what I got when I selected "Show only open access journals":²
   
   Those are some interesting alternatives I'll have to consider next time we have a paper ready to submit.