Hello, I am 4th year medical student from Mexico and I lead a research group conformed mainly of other medical students with senior researchers as advisors. We are currently conducting 2 systematic reviews. Specifically, we are in the protocol writing stage. We would like to, apart from registering in PROSPERO, publish the protocol in Systematic Reviews (ISSN: 2046-4053) or any other journal that accept protocols for publications. How can we get funds for APC? Is it common for medical students to get funding from their universities to publish Open Access?
Any Journal recommendations for publishing the protocols, preferably if no open access fee is mandatory would be great.
Thank you in advance!!
I believe there are very few journals that will publish open access without charging a fee; it is necessary to cover the costs of publishing as the journal does not receive fees from subscribers such as universities. However, there are a few options.
1. Check if your university has any 'read and publish' agreements with publishers, they enable one to publish open access free in any journal under that publisher.
2. Newly created open access journals often waive the APC fee, look at MDPI and Elsevier journals first, though other publishers do this as well.
3. Apply for funding for organisations with an interest in your review topic.
4. Settle for 'green open access'. All the major publishers (excluding MDPI and Frontiers) offer 'green open access' for free. This lets you share the 'accepted manuscript' on your institution's website and sometimes also on AXVIR. The 'pre-print' is not copyrighted and can be shared anywhere you like. Elsevier and SAGE have generous polices on this. The accepted manuscript and pre-print will be indexed by Google Scholar and linked to your research/ citation within a few weeks.
As a side, I think you should be more concerned about getting the actual systematic review published open access (same steps as above apply). Few people will be interested in your protocol, unless you are doing some massive ground-breaking review.
Hello Isaías Raymundo Ramírez Díaz
I totally agree this is hard - to get funding. In the first instance, I would approach my university faculty (even before graduation). Please take encouragement that very few students do this so the faculty might be more generous because you are a so-called "special case"!
I would also consider publication in non-OA journals, even though, as you said, that would be sub-optimal.
It might be worth enquiring to the International Journal of Medical Students. Protocols is not one of the regular sections but still worth your effort to ask. You have nothing to lose! The worst they can say (politely) is no.
https://ijms.info/IJMS
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