This page of information and tips on publishing and measuring and improving your research impact.
On this page you'll find:
And you might try:
Some journal lists with metrics:
These are few sites offering reviews of (experiences with) journals. These are still in their infancy, so the number of reviewed journals is limited. You can help by filling out a review or scorecard.
Open Access: why, where, how? The Basics
Why?
1) Because it gives more people access to (publicly funded) science (=idealism, accountability). The UU has signed the Berlin Declaration supporting this idea.
2) Because it gives your work greater exposure (self interest)
3) Because it increases the chance of your work being cited (Wagner 2010 bibliography of Open Access citation advantage (self interest)
4) Because in the long term it may save universities money, and thus potentially increase research budgets
5) Because it gives a signal to publishers currently making huge profits to change their pricing policy
6) Because sometimes it is a requirement set by research funding bodies: Wellcome Trust / NIH / ERC / ESCR (UK) / NWO / FP7 / Horizon 2020
Where?
1) In real full Open Access journals (golden route), see lists at DOAJ. Web of Scoence also has an OA filer (at the journal level); or in real Open Access books.
2) As an OA article in regular journals offering OA against a fee (APC, article processing charge). Most publishers currently offer offer this option. These journals are called hybrid journals, becuaqse articles may be OA or non-OA
3) In university repositories such as Igitur or other institutional repositories such as PubMedCentral by sharing the last refereed author version of the article (green route) which many commercial publishers allow (see Sherpa Romeo site for what is allowed). Some publishers even allow deposit of the publisher’s version. Depositing can be done by your department through Metis or by you using the publications tab in your UU profile page.
4) In pre-prints or working paper archives as is common in physics, pyschology, computer science and economics [such as ArXiv, CERN, CogPrints EconPapers]
Golden route: free or fee?
1) Free, in OA journals not requiring a fee
2) With financial support to pay the APC fee::
- NWO fund ( for NWO funded research, max 5000€ per project)
- UU fund (50%)
3) Free for you, in journals for which the fee has already been paid through a generic deal (e.g. in some Physics Journals)
Drawbacks, obstacles, things that need working on
1) More difficult to cite exact pages of author versions because the lack markup and page numbering
2) Many recently set up OA journals have not yet been included in journal impact databases such as WoS/JCR and Scopus (but this is improving)
3) DOAJ listing does not (yet) show whether journals are peer reviewed
4) A small number of OA journals and repositories is not yet well indexed by Google Scholar
5) In some disciplines full OA journals are still lacking in number or quality
By the way...
1) The University Library actively supports the creation of new Open Access journals
2) There are special licenses you can send to your publisher allowing you to retain the copyright
More information in our full 
Open Access LibGuide
Open Access articles are freely available. Below you will find a list of search engines containing only or mainly Open Access material
If you want to find out what journals are Open Access you can check the Directory of Open Access Journals.
And use the Lean Library extension, it will tell you if an open access version of the article is available.
There are various types of sites and services that are important in fostering your visibility:
| Mendeley | Google Scholar | ORCID | Researcher ID | ScopusID | Research Gate | Academia edu* | UU pages | |
| publications list | y | y | y | y | y | y | y | y |
| publications linked | y | y | y | y | y | (poss.) | (poss.) | (poss.) |
| publications metrics | y | y | n | y | y | y | y | n |
| soc. media links | n | n | n | n | n | y | y | n |
| bio, interests, affil | y | y | y | y | n | y | y | y |
| user accounts 201310 | 2.5 million | ? | >250K | ? | na | ~3 million | 4.9 milllion | all UU |
| user accounts 201410 | > 3 million | ? | >950K | ? | na | ~5 million | >14.6 million | all UU |
| Utrecht users 201210 | 229 | 437 | ? | 273 | na | >1000 | 986 | all |
| Utrecht users 201303 | ? | 585 | ? | 276 | na | 2304 | 1295 | all |
| Utrecht users 201310 (incl. UMCU) | ~1500? (Jan 2014) | 678 | ~80 | 376 | na | 3036 | 1401 | all |
|
Utrecht users 201410 (incl. UMCU) |
? | 968 | 476 (UU only) | 478 | na | 3648 | 3013 | all |
| Utrecht users 201704 | 9449 | all | ||||||
| uploading papers | y | n | n | n | n | y | y | y |
| adding publication data manually | y | y | y | n | n | y | y | n |
| adding publications (semi)automatically | many search engines + import RIS or BibTeX | Google Scholar |
Crossref + Scopus + RsearcherID + DataCite + PubMedCentral Europe |
WoS + ORCID | Scopus | PubMed + IEEE + CiteSeer + RepEc + BMC | Crossref + Microsoft AS+ PubMed + ArXiv | Metis / Pure |
* Academia figures include students and alumni
There is also a training available to learn more about researcher profiles
In Web of Science you can find your h-index via the Authors option. Search for your name and make sure you include all name variants, or search for your author identifier such as ORCiD or Web of Science ResearcherID. In the next screen you can again combine author records if needed.
The h-index is calculated as follows: h is the biggest number for which there are h publications which are all cited at least h times. For example, if an author has five publications, with 9, 7, 6, 2, and 1 citations (ordered from greatest to least), then the author's h-index is 3, because the author has three publications with 3 or more citations. However, the author does not have four publications with 4 or more citations (source: Wikipedia).
This way the h-index expresses in one number the extent to which your work is cited ánd the quantity of your publications. H-indexes of starting researchers are always low, even when they have written some widely cited articles. Your H-index can never get lower, not even when you have stopped publishing or when your work does not receive citations anymore.
Besides, the h-index is a relative index. A low score in one subject area, may be very high in another. An H-index is only meaningful when you compare it to that of colleagues in your own discipline.
An h-index is determined by the content of the search engine. At Web of Science, the coverage is not equally good for every discipline. For a more complete overview, you should therefore also view your h-index in, for example, Scopus or calculate your h-index using Google Scholar. h-indexes from different databases are therefore not mutually comparable!