
Ask HN: What are the best open-access journals for non-academics to submit to? - freeradical13
I&#x27;m a non-academic and I would like to submit an article for peer review and publishing. I prefer that there&#x27;s zero or minimal cost, although I understand the scope of review and editing will be lower.<p>What are the best open access journals out there? Are there any that have particularly bad reputations to avoid? Thanks.
======
dijksterhuis
Publishing to arXiv [1][2] is your best bet in the short term.

\- Free

\- Lots of subject areas (not just computer sci.)

\- People may cite your work

\- People may offer feedback

You do need to get endorsed first though [4] (as another comment mentions).

However, if you want "proper" peer reviewed & published, you need to start
looking around at conferences. They're usually easier to get something
through, as they tend to expect much shorter papers.

There are industry led conferences (like RuhrSec [3] for Cyber Security) which
might be a good route to start with.

But, really, there's no shortcut for getting into a "proper" journal /
conference. You need to research, have funds, time and, sometimes, a bit of
fame already.

[1] [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16832/why-
uploa...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16832/why-upload-to-
academic-preprint-sites-like-arxiv)

[2]
[https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1C](https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1C)

[3] [https://www.ruhrsec.de/2019/](https://www.ruhrsec.de/2019/)

[4] [https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

~~~
srouhaewaehy
> However, if you want "proper" peer reviewed & published.

So, why would you want "proper" peer review nowadays? It should be a means to
achieve something else. Just for the challenge?

I mean besides arXiv there are many ways you can get your knowledge out there
if you want to give people free (or even paid) access to it. This will also
create a lot of Feedback if it's the least bit interesting.

If you want your knowledge to generate new products and companies you will
also find that Startups nowadays don't wait for peer review before they
launch.

So the only practical reason I can see is if you want to get funding. And Then
you use the funding to create more papers. To… well… get more funding.

TL;DR: If you think about that you want to have "proper" peer review meaybe
you should spend some time thinking about what you actually want to achieve
and if there aren't better ways to get there.

~~~
mcguire
Absolutely. None of the modern advancements in knowledge and understanding
involve the waste of time known as "peer-review". See
[http://timecube.2enp.com/](http://timecube.2enp.com/).

~~~
barry-cotter
We know peer review is unnecessary for quality and progress in science because
it only became a standard after WWII. Einstein published one peer reviewed
paper.

There are multiple fields that have routed around peer review; everything that
works on preprints and working papers. It takes more than two years to get an
Economics paper published. If it took that long for things to get eyeballs
progress would be exceedingly slow.

Peer review may have some good points but it certainly isn’t necessary to
modern advancements in knowledge and understanding.

~~~
dijksterhuis
That one economics paper, as an example, could have made one seemingly
innocuous assumption that might be overlooked by later work.

Let's say a paper that relies on the preprint take that assumption for
granted. And then another paper references that one. And again. And again.

Then the fifth paper gets adopted by a government in some esoteric policy,
which causes their economy to implode.

May not be necessary to just publish "stuff", but it is necessary to mitigate
against the dangers of invalid assumptions.

~~~
barry-cotter
Peer Review has not stopped the situationyou describe from occurring in
multiple fields. Social Psychology is particularly bad but cancer biology
isn’t great either.

——-

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

[https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

Bayer and Amgen, reported dismal results when they tried to reproduce some
cancer papers. Only 25 percent of the papers Bayer examined were reproduced.
Amgen was able to replicate only six out of the 53 studies it examined.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2017/01/18/5103048...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2017/01/18/510304871/what-does-it-mean-when-cancer-findings-cant-be-
reproduced)

Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18

An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments
from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number,
now expects to complete just 18 studies.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-
replicate-50-hi...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-
replicate-50-high-impact-cancer-papers-shrinks-just-18)

------
dannykwells
Open access journals by definition are almost never free/minimal cost - the
idea is the the author's are paying _more_ of the costs associated with
publication, not less. But in return, your article can be read or accessed by
anyone.

If you want to fork over 5k, I would recommend PLOS ONE as a major, well
recognized open access journal that takes the "publish anything with
scientific merit" approach.

If you do not want to pay, Arxiv is your best bet. However, I will say that,
while good papers end up on arxiv, so do lots and lots of bad ones (that's the
point) and there's no concept of "peer review" there.

~~~
freeradical13
That's a very helpful summary, thanks. From another comment, it seems arXiv
requires academic affiliation or endorsement:
[https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

Are there any others?

~~~
mindcrime
My understanding is that whether or not endorsement is required is dependent
on which "area" you submit to. And even if I'm wrong about that, "endorsement"
in their terms is really just meant to mean "this person is not a total quack
/ spammer / etc." So don't feel shy about reaching out to people in the
academic community who are potential endorsers and just ask "I want to submit
this to ArXiv, would you be willing to give it a quick look and possibly
endorse me so I can submit?"

If you already know somebody in the academic community, it would probably be
better to try them first. But if not, it appears that ArXiv etiquette allows
cold-emailing people... they just ask you not to blast requests out to mass
numbers of people simultaneously.

------
chrisseaton
You need to specify your field. What's your article about?

Different fields do things entirely differently, and short of publishing in
Nature journals are very specific to their fields.

~~~
freeradical13
Here's my draft article:
[https://github.com/freeradical13/ValueBasedPrioritization/ra...](https://github.com/freeradical13/ValueBasedPrioritization/raw/master/value_based_prioritization.pdf)

I'm not really sure what field I'm targeting, so I was hoping people would
note their favorite open access journals and I could investigate (and I also
thought a more generic list would be generally interesting to all the HN
folk).

~~~
dijksterhuis
Comments from a machine learning / AI focused PhD student. Sorry if I get a
bit ridiculous below, I'm up to my neck in coffee and having one of my more
"esoteric" days...

0) Golden rules:

\- Readability & formatting matters.

\- Know your audience.

\- Context matters.

\- Brevity is best.

\- Be clear & concise.

\- Abstract, General Intro, Aims, Background/Previous work, Method, Results,
Conclusions, Future work => In that order.

\- _Most important_ : Nothing goes into the main body unless it makes a
tangible, useful & clear contribution.

Some of the best papers are the shortest ones: I can read, understand and
explain it to someone else in 1 hour. Among the worst are the 25 pagers that
take me 2 days to realise that they aren't useful to me.

1) Footnotes

You aren't commenting code. If it doesn't go in the main text, why is it even
there? It is distracting away from the important part - the main body of text.

It either lives in the main text body, a reference or the appendix. If it
doesn't live there, then _maybe_ footnote (e.g. a url to some very specific
data you trained against).

Get very delete happy with them. For example:

\- viii & xiii @ on page 3, xvi @ page 4 should either be in main body (if
important, they don't look it), or deleted.

\- Things like python commands should just get dumped in the appendix. No
footnote / reference. A blanket "you can see all the commands used along with
descriptions in the appendix". I'm going to look at what is in the appendix
anyway. Because I'm a pedantic academic.

2) Formatting:

\- Think about using a template like [1].

\- Reduce your font size to 10pt please.

\- If you are going to be very maths heavy, think about moving to a single
column style. I, personally, find it makes it easier to read eqns and to
follow their logic. Currently I have to jump from around the page and keep
getting lost.

\- For sections 5 & 6: Stop _putting_ something in _bold_ every paragraph.
_Bold_ is only _to_ _highlight_ when it's _really important_. The _name_ of
something _is_ not _really important_. Prefer _italics_ over _bold_ , but even
use that _sparingly_. How _difficult_ was it _to_ focus _on_ reading _this_
paragraph when the _words_ keep changing _shape_?

3) Graphs & Tables

Graphs & Tables exist at the top of a page. That's the only place they live if
they live in the main body. They don't have to be on the same page as where
you refer to them, and you can group them together. Otherwise, appendix that
stuff.

Else you'll to end up with blank space (like end of page 4 & 5) and formatting
headaches later on.

You haven't done your results discussion part yet... When you do, make sure
you don't talk about every single table/graph. Only talk about the results
that are important. Otherwise it's guff that will bore your audience.

4) Structure:

You have so many sections that I need a table of contents to work out where I
am. For a 10-15 pager, that's silly. Learn to love subsections. Especially
those early parts.

5) Intro & Background work:

I have no idea what previous work this relates to. Is there previous work in
the field? If so, talk about it. Talk about how you're improving it. Talk
about what the __context __of this paper is.

Don't know what the context is? Then you better find out... People will ask!

6) Quotations

This seems like a technical paper, not an English lit assignment. If you
directly quote anything, let alone a whole paragraph, it better blow my mind.
I am afraid page 3, column 2 does not. Remove it. Just reference anything like
that. If people want/need to know, they will read it too.

[1] [https://www.ctan.org/pkg/ieeetran](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/ieeetran)

~~~
freeradical13
I've integrated your feedback here:
[https://github.com/freeradical13/ValueBasedPrioritization/ra...](https://github.com/freeradical13/ValueBasedPrioritization/raw/master/value_based_prioritization.pdf)

I tried to let the figures and tables float but I disliked the strange spacing
that resulted. I also tried putting them at the top and it was very hard to
follow.

Thanks again for your very thoughtful feedback!

------
zerotolerance
It bothers me that HTTP + aggregators or search failed so hard in this arena.
I'd prefer an "IPFS + curated journal documents" model to any of these "hubs."

------
blakesterz
Walt Crawford has done quite a bit of interesting work in this area, he's got
a book out that looks at OA journals here:

[https://waltcrawford.name/goaj3.pdf](https://waltcrawford.name/goaj3.pdf)

More writing here:

[https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html](https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html)

I'm not sure that's exactly helpful for what you're asking about, but it's a
good read for anyone interested in this area.

------
JD557
If you are into AI/ML, I believe that
[https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/) allows you to submit papers as a
non-academic.

Be aware that they are slightly different than other publications and have
some special requirements (for example, I believe that your paper should have
some interactive diagrams if possible).

------
jfsantos
For articles on open-source software, I would recommend JOSS [1]. The
organization that publishes JOSS has other journals [2], but nothing in the
lines of your study.

[1] [https://joss.theoj.org/](https://joss.theoj.org/)

[2] [http://www.theoj.org/](http://www.theoj.org/)

~~~
la_fayette
Does this journal have a ranking or impact factor?

------
ArtWomb
I see plenty of unaffiliated submissions on Arxiv. Why not just post it there
and distribute the url? My one suggestion would be to read the target style
guide of the academic journals you'd like to be in (such as Nature). And hew
as near as polished for your own paper before submitting.

~~~
alboy
You can't "just post" something on arXiv as an unaffiliated researcher, you
need to be endorsed first.

[https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

------
urbanslug
If it's software you can submit to The Journal of Open Source Software
[https://joss.theoj.org](https://joss.theoj.org) which will cost you as much
as making a pull request as far as I know :-)

------
pvaldes
That would depend on the topic of the article.

------
kakaoscott
Interesting... there should be a good one available. Will be following this
post.

------
anewhnaccount2
Definitely depends on what the topic of the article is I should think.

