Open Journals @ Queen's

It is important to develop an effective and targeted strategy for marketing your journal to the various stakeholders who will benefit from and potentially contribute to your journal.

• Researchers, scientists, professionals, students
• University, institution and corporate libraries
• Online retailers, library suppliers and other trade partners

1. Enable readers to keep-up-to-date with new issues of your journal - set-up an eTable-of-Contents Alert to their inbox or RSS reader, Twitter account, Facebook and other social media tools
2. Include the website URL to your journal in your email signature

3. Enable your journal articles to be easily found by assigning a unique Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to each article.  See: The Library's DOI Minting Service.

4. Generate discussion, comment and other engagement around your journal, consider:
   • Creating a blog, Facebook page or Twitter account for your journal or allied research areas: include a cover picture and the link to the articles page where readers can view a preview. Invite your friends to become a fan and send comments about your journal.
   • Create a LinkedIn page for the journal and connect with authors who you would like to publish
   • Join academic social networking sites: Academics, researchers and practitioners are increasingly using social communities as a way of collaborating with people who share the same research interests as well as finding the latest research. For example: MyNetResearch, ResearchGate, academia.edu.

Getting your publication indexed in the most appropriate venues for your intended audience, both readers and potential content contributors will enhance its visibility, exposure and potential impact.  

All Queen's journals supported by the Library's Journal Hosting Service are automatically indexed in:

1. Google
2. Scholars Portal Journals: A database of over 18,163 full-text journals across every discipline. Each journal publisher must complete a separate Local Archiving and Hosting Agreement with Scholars Portal.

Contact Queen's OJS Administrator for help with getting your OJS journal indexed in key search engines and databases in your field.

Tip: To identify appropriate online databases or indices in which to index your journal so that it reaches the intended audience for your discipline or field search Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. This is a comprehensive world-wide directory of journals. Search for related high quality journals in your area, then click on the red tab titled “Abstracting, Indexing and Article Access” to view indices where the journal has been indexed.

It is important that your journal is visible where researchers start their search. The majority of readers and potential authors will find your journal through search engines as well as specialised indices. The publisher - Wiley has created a useful SEO for Authors Tips Sheet.

Also see Wiley’s: Toolkit: Journal Author Promotion.

Licensing your open access journal under a Creative Commons License facilitates other scholars to re-use the works in order to generate new contributions to the existing body of knowledge in your discipline.

You can specify usage rights for works in the license. There are 6 licenses to choose from and all require attribution, signified by the ‘BY’ in each license name.

For more information see:

• About Creative Commons
• Creative Commons FAQ
• Creative Commons: what every educator needs to know (presentation)

To access the suite of journal usage statistics available via OJS 3.0.2, login to your journal site and navigate to: Tools -> Statistics.

From here, you can access the following statistics reports tracking the details associated with site usage and submissions over a given period of time. Reports are generated in CSV format which requires a spreadsheet application to view.

• View Report: Provides a report on galley and abstract views by readers (i.e., how many times a PDF for an article has been viewed).
• Articles Report: Provides a spreadsheet of all published articles.
• Review Report: Provides a spreadsheet of all review activity.

You can also use the 'Generate Custom Report' feature to build your own reports.  For example, aggregate statistics on journal article usage by country, city, month or day.