Publishing in Journals

The rapid move towards digital publishing has led to an unprecedented increase in the number journals available to our researchers to publish in.  On top of leaving researchers overwhelmed by the choice of journals for publication, they also have to consider whether the journal they want to publish in is legitimate and noteworthy, i.e. not predatory. 

There are various publishing models:

• Traditional, which is not free (pay for access/licenses);
• Green, which is not free, but allows authors to place articles in open-access repositories;
• Hybrid, which is not free, but allows authors to pay to make a specific article freely available; and
• Gold, which is an entirely free, open access publishing model.

Although the idea of a journal that is freely available to the public, with no financial barriers to access, seems like a good choice, when it comes to publishing, many researchers struggle with the decision of whether to do so in an open access journal versus a traditional (and perhaps more well-established) journal. The four main factors usually considered when making this decision are visibility, cost, prestige and speed.

NUST has identified indices that it deems to contain accredited journals and is encouraging its researchers to publish in the journals that appears in the below indices:

• Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection Indexes
  • Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) -- 1900-present
  • Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) -- 1900-present
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) -- 1975-present
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) -- 2015-present
• Scopus
• DHET List of Accredited South African Journals
• MathSciNet
• zbMATH
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• SciELO SA (Open Access)
• NUST Additional Accredited Journals List (This list will consist of journals evaluated by the Library, on request from NUST researchers and approved by the Institutional Research and Publications Committee for inclusion.)

Evaluation criteria for indexing as accredited journals:

Web of Science  |  Scopus  |  DHET  |  MathSciNet  |  zbMATH  |  DOAJ  |  Scielo SA  |  NUST Additional Accredited Journals