What are some of the benefits of publishing in an open access journal?
Open access journals allow for quicker dissemination of research knowledge among the research community. This is possible because, unlike traditional journals, readers do not have to pay to access research articles. Thus, academic research is made freely available to everyone who wants to read it, thereby increasing its reach several fold.
Easy access of work to researchers, may also lead to new discoveries. Given that the knowledge in your paper would be accessible to several researchers from the research community, it could result in someone coming up with a solution to something that you may have not thought of before. Open access can also lead to an increase in citation count. The more the number of people your work is accessible to, higher the chance of you receiving citations.
With the increasing awareness about the significance of open access due to the revolutionary Plan S, the number of funding agencies demanding that research from their fund should be openly available is on the rise. Open access publishing can therefore also help you to secure funding.
Also, contrary to the belief that open access publishing is expensive, there are several open access journals that offer a fee-waiver to those authors who come from developing countries and cannot afford to pay for it.
However, a note of caution, the demand for open access journals has led to the issue of predatory publishers. These are fake publishers who publish whatever is submitted to them for a fee, without actually putting the paper through a peer review. Therefore, in order to ensure that your target open access journal is authentic, you need to check for its availability in an abstracting and indexing database such as DOAJ.
